Electronic Book Review - hayleshttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/tags/hayles
enThe Code is not the Text (unless it is the Text)http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/literal
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<div class="field-item even">John Cayley</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2002-09-10</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Digital utopianism is still with us. It is with us despite having been tempered by network logistics and an all-too-reasonable demand for ‘content.’ Admittedly, New Media has aged. It has acquired a history or at least some genuine engagement with the reality principle, now that the Net is accepted as a material and cultural given of the developed world, now that the dot.coms have crashed, now that unsolicited marketing email and commercialism dominates network traffic. Nonetheless, artistic practice in digital media is still often driven by youthful, escapist, utopian enthusiasms. Net Art as such pretends to leapfrog this naivety through the wholesale importation of informed, ironic, postmodern conceptualism, offering us the shock of the virtual-visceral banal at every possible juncture. Other, more traditionally delineated arts - literature, music, photography, fine art, architecture, graphics, etc. - struggle to cope with the reconfiguration of their media, or with a migration to complex new media which are suddenly shared, suddenly intercommunicable with those of artistic practices previously considered to be distinct. One way of coping is escape.</p>
<p>I write as a literary artist, my ever-provisional, traditionally delineated subject position in this context: poet. When asked, in social contexts, I don’t really know what to call myself, although - when I manage to remember the phrase - ‘literal artist’ seems about right. I write as a practitioner, but I am interested in the theory underlying my practice because I recognise that my artistic media are being reconfigured to a degree which may well be catastrophic, or, at least, allow me and my fellow writers to recall that these media - textual media - have always been subject to reconfiguration. Serious formalism in literature was never just a matter of rhetorical flourish; it was inevitably, ineluctably, concerned with the materiality of language, and therefore with the affect and significance of language as such.</p>
<p>If you persist, you are about to read a theoretically-inflected critique of what some people call ‘codework.’ Potentially codework is a term for literature which uses, addresses, and incorporates code: as underlying language-animating or language-generating programming, as a special type of language in itself, or as an intrinsic part of the new surface language or ‘interface text,’ as I call it, of writing in networked and programmable media. Why do many of the current instantiations of codework, along with some of the theoretical writing that underpins this practice, require critique at this time? What is at stake? I have to try and briefly answer this question at the outset, because what follows is largely critical, something I wrote and felt I’d completed in response to questions which are only now being formulated; it is part of an emergent debate about the role of code in literal art. There will be much more to write, at other times and places, which is less critical and more generative, precisely because of what is at stake.</p>
<p>In utopia, because you are nowhere you are everywhere at once. Transparency and translatability are key values of digital utopianism. We should perhaps remain sceptical not only concerning the no-place itself but also concerning its values. Are they indeed values? In much current codework language is (presented as) code and code is (presented as) language. The utopia of codework recognises that the symbols of the surface language (what you read from your screen) are the ‘same’ (and are all ultimately reducible to digital encoding) as the symbols of the programming languages which store, manipulate, and display the text you read. The mutual transparency and translatability of code and language becomes a utopian value, and when it is recast as the postmodern virtual-visceral banal - as the mutual infection-contamination of language by code and code by language - it becomes a subversive (i.e. potentially progressive) utopian value. Basically, my argument in what follows is that, in much existing codework, this is as far as we get. A simple point based on digital transparency and translatability is being made in a context which is already utopian and this more or less exhausts the significance and affect of the work. If, furthermore, your focus remains fixed on the interface text - on what can be read and recorded from the screen as writing - then much critical energy goes into interpreting work with an all-but-exhausted aesthetic program in a fairly traditional and conservative manner. The code is in the text or the text is in the code, and it’s there because it can be, and that’s what we have to say about it.</p>
<p>So what is left outside of this utopia? It is obviously a tactical exaggeration to say that most instances of codework in networked and programmable media are exhausted by the aesthetic I have briefly introduced and caricatured. More accurately, there is a problem with the way code-as-text is appreciated and appropriated within the broader critical ‘language of new media.’ Much work exists that can not or should not be assimilated into the utopia of code-language transparency. I argue that certain reasons why such work is alien to the utopia of transparency are also precisely reasons why it is able to generate significance and affect - because the code is not necessarily transparent or visible in human-readable language; because code has its own structures, vocabularies and syntaxes; because it functions, typically, without being observed, perhaps even as a representative of secret workings, interiority, hidden process; because there are divisions and distinctions between what the code is and does, and what the language of the interface text is and does, and so on. A specialised appreciation for code does not in any way preclude the mutual contamination of code and natural language in the texts that we read on screen, it simply acknowledges that - in their proper places, where they function - code and language require distinct strategies of reading. The necessity to maintain these distinct strategies as such should lead, eventually, to better critical understanding of more complex ways to read and write which are commensurate with the practices of literal art in programmable media.</p>
<p>To conclude these introductory remarks, here is a suggestive and non-exhaustive list of things I believe are at stake, a list of approaches to work which risk being ignored or downgraded if we remain focused on codework as code-language transparency:</p>
<p>- If a codework text, however mutually contaminated, is read primarily as the language displayed on a screen then its address is simplified. It is addressed to a human reader who is implicitly asked to assimilate the code as part of natural language. This reading simplifies the intrinsically complex address of writing in programmable media. At the very least, for example, composed code is addressed to a processor, perhaps also addressed to specific human readers (those who are able to ‘crack’ or ‘hack’ it); while the text on the screen is simultaneously? asynchronously? addressed to human readers generally. Complexities of address should not be bracketed within a would-be creolized language of the new media utopia.</p>
<p>- Address to other, unusual reading processes - the machine itself, or particular human readers who have learned how systems read - implies the need for different persuasive strategies, different strategies for generating significance and affect. I mean that the rhetoric of writing in code must be distinct. Again, appeal to values of hybridity and mutual linguistic contamination (addressed to postmodern humans) threatens to conceal the emergence of new or less familiar rhetorical strategies. In what follows I briefly mention two of these, the tropes of strict logical process and another I identify with compilation in the programmer’s sense. There is a lot of very necessary work to be done here, identifying the unacknowledged tropes and figures of literal art in new media. Perhaps even certain questions concerning the rhetoric of electronic games (when viewed as literal art) could be studied in this context. For example, the trope of ‘playability’ emerges as much from the composition of code as from the ‘writing’ (in the scriptwriter’s sense) during games development.</p>
<p>- Reading codework as code-in-language and language-in-code also risks stunning the resultant literary object, leaving it reduced to simple text-to-be-read, whereas there are real questions of how such work is to be grasped as an object: is it text, process, performance, instrument? If code is treated distinctly, as an aspect of writing with its own structures and effects, then we gain in the potential to articulate more appropriate classes of literal objects, with instrument, for example, forming one class I would prefer, personally, to instantiate and explore.</p>
<p>- A question I do begin to engage in what follows is the materiality of language and how this may be evolving in writing for programmable media. I query N. Katherine Hayles’ position in the code-as-text debate, particularly her readings of the work of certain codework artists along with her invocation of the ‘flickering signifier,’ which I suspect her of using to underpin this codework despite the fact that such work does not necessarily engage with the materiality of a flickering signifier. By the time we get to read code-as-text, in most cases it is presented as, at best, a chain of resolved floating signifiers, with the code elements simply providing a layer of associative complexity or slippage. Hayles’ signifier has far greater potential and this not always operating in the code-as-text variety of literal art. The flickering signifier cannot simply be seen as something which goes on behind the screen; it emerges when code is allowed, as I say, its proper place and function: when the composed code runs. As it runs, the code is not the text, it is not a set of (non-sequential) links in a chain of signifiers; the code is what makes them flicker, what transforms them from writing as record of static or floating simultaneities into writing as the presentation of atoms of signification which are themselves time-based (they are not what they are without their flickering transformations over time, however fleeting these may be).</p>
<p>- The implicit requirement - at one and the same time - to pay close and particular attention to the role of code in literal art, while, at certain moments of reading, to allow that this distinct role functions in concealment, will have practical as well as theoretical effects on artists’ creative methodology even if only to help them to better understand how and why they are working with code. The emergent materiality of the signifier - flickering, time-based - creates a new relationship between media and content. Programming the signifier itself, as it were, brings transactive mediation to the scene of writing at the very moment of meaning creation. Mediation can no longer be characterised as subsidiary or peripheral; it becomes text rather than paratext. Criticism of code-making in this context becomes even more important and central than, for example, the criticism of instrumentation or interpretation in musical recital. What I say about new media literary objects being reconceived as ‘instruments’ is not meant to imply that they are, in any sense, merely instrumental.</p>
<p>The question of the materiality of the signifier, in particular, is a big one, which I believe Hayles is currently readdressing and which I hope to take up in a sequel to what finally, now follows.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">*</p>
<p>The use of networked and programmable systems as both delivery and compositional media for literal and verbal art (and other forms of new media art) has provoked critical engagements which pretend to reveal and exam the various levels of code and encoding which are constituent of programmatological systems. <cite id="note_^1">Certain terms in this essay may require explanation. I prefer, despite its awkwardness and length, ‘writing in networked and programmable media’ to any of the current words or phrases such as ‘hypertext, hyperfiction, hyperpoetry,’ etc. or the corresponding ‘cyber-’ terms, although I do generally subscribe to Espen Aarseth’s ‘textonomy,’ and would prefer cybertext to hypertext as the more inclusive, ‘catholic’ term. Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1997). I use ‘programmatology’ and ‘programmatological’ by extension from ‘grammatology’ and especially ‘applied grammatology’ as elaborated by Gregory Ulmer. Gregory L. Ulmer, Applied Grammatology: Post(E)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985). Programmatology may be thought of as the study and practice of writing (Derridean sense) with an explicit awareness of its relation to ‘programming’ or prior writing in anticipation of performance (including the performance of reading). I try to avoid the use of the word ‘computer’ etc. and prefer, wherever possible, ‘programmaton’ for the programmable systems which we use to compose and deliver ‘new media.’</cite> The title of the section of the p0es1s programme which provoked this paper - ‘Code as Text as Literature’ - is a case in point. <cite id="note_^2">This essay was originally sketched out for the “p0es1s: poetics of digital text” symposion (sic), held in Erfurt, 28-29 September, 2001 (<a href="http://www.p0es1s.com">http://www.p0es1s.com</a>).</cite> In more extreme forms of such engagement, a radical post-human reductionism may be proposed, such as that, for example, which can be read from certain of Friedrich Kittler’s essays, in which the ramifications of “so-called human” culture, especially as played out on new media, become qualitatively indistinguishable from “signifiers of voltage difference” (“There Is No Software” 150), demonstrably the final, lowest-level ‘ground code’ of the increasingly familiar practices of cultural production which make use of programmable tools; and perhaps also essential to the brain activity which generates the objects and subjects of psychoanalysis. <a href="http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/future-anterior" class="internal">Kittler is reviewed by Bruce Clarke in ebr…</a> Nowadays voltage difference accounts for and instantiates everything from the encrypted transactional play of internet banking to the promised consensual hallucination of immersive Virtual Reality. However, the purpose of this brief paper is to address a number of less productive confusions which arise from this engagement with code-as-text, citing a few examples of artistic practice and a number of critical sources. <cite id="note_^3">There are times when I would like to write ‘code-as-text’ and other times, ‘text-as-code,’ occasionally with either term cycling (code-as-text-code, etc.) I will just use the one term, asking the reader to bear in mind the other possibilities in appropriate contexts.</cite> While allowing the value of certain metacritical statements such as Kittler’s (which take on questions of what culture is or may become), my aim is to disallow a wilful critical confusion of code and text, to make it harder for critics to avoid addressing one or the other by pretending that they are somehow equivalent, or that codes and texts are themselves ambiguously addressed to human readers and/or machinic processors (unless they are so addressed, however ambiguously). <cite id="note_^4">As an example of the prevalence of code-as-text across the widest range of artistic inscription, a version of the code-as-text or reveal code aesthetic appears as something of a culmination in Lev Manovich’s excellent and provocative The Language of New Media (not discussed in the body of the present essay because of my focus on textual and literal art practice). The final section of Manovich’s book is entitled ‘Cinema as Code’ and features Vuk Cosic’s ASCII films, “which effectively stage one characteristic of computer-based moving images - their identity as computer code.” Manovich is undoubtedly correct when he asserts that, “What [George] Lucas hides, Cosic reveals. His ASCII films ‘perform’ the new status of media as digital data… Thus rather than erasing the image in favour of the code … or hiding the code from us … code and image coexist.” Nonetheless, it is worrying to be presented, in this highlighted context, with the example of work whose aesthetic may well prove to be exhausted by a conceptual and metacritical analysis (see below), particularly in a book which makes an unprecedented contribution to our understanding of new and emergent rhetorical strategies in new media (especially the crucial role of cinematic rhetoric), and represents a deep understanding of new media’s programmatological dimension. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, ed. Roger F. Malina, Leonardo (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001) 330-33.</cite></p>
<p>I have invoked reductionism and by this I mean a critical thrust which, implicitly or otherwise, asks questions like, ‘What (ultimately) is this object we are examining? What is its structure? What are its essential or operative characteristics?’ and then finds special critical significance in the answers proposed. In N. Katherine Hayles’ sophisticated version of what can be read as a code-as-text argument, this reductive inclination is in evidence. Her essay ‘Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers’ discovers a new or emergent object, the flickering signifier, and derives important consequences from its instantiations and methods. “The contemporary pressure toward dematerialization, understood as an epistemic shift toward pattern/randomness and away from presence/absence, affects human and textual bodies on two levels at once, as a change in the body (the material substrate) and a change in the message (the codes of representation).” <cite id="note_^5">N. Katherine Hayles, “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,” in <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics</span> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 29. An earlier version of this essay is also published as: N. Katherine Hayles, “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,” in <span class="booktitle">Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation</span>, ed. Timothy Druckery (New York: Aperture, 1996).</cite> In other words, Hayles suggests that the constituent structure of the signifier itself may be seen as changed in contemporary culture and especially as expressed in ‘new media.’ Both the materiality and the represented content of cultural practice and production has been affected. Before examining parts of Hayles’ argument in more detail, I want simply to point out that it is clearly determined by its metacritical significance and has a reductive inclination: signifiers have come to be such and such, therefore - albeit in a cybernetic feedback loop - cultural production (in Hayles’ essay “the represented worlds of contemporary fiction”) follows suit. Hayles’ characterization of a multiply mediated signifier which flickers from level to level in chained coded structures is, as a metacritical statement, highly suggestive and useful. However, when it comes to art practice and the critique of this practice, how does such insight figure?</p>
<p>What is missing from Hayles’ analysis is a set of relationships - relationships constituted <span class="lightEmphasis">by</span> artistic practice - between a newly problematized linguistic materiality and represented content. These would inevitably express themselves in formal as well as conceptual address to what she identifies as a changed matter of language and literature. Hayles’ chosen examples, with, perhaps, the exception of her use of William Burroughs, demonstrate conceptual rather than formal address; they represent flickering signification as concept rather than as instantiation in the language of the work. Hayles cites, most extensively, William Gibson’s <span class="booktitle">Neuromancer</span> as a prime example of represented content affected by and expressive of the flickering signifier. While Gibson brilliantly conveys the literally flickering, scanned and rasterized, apparent immateriality of an informatic realm, the ‘consensual hallucination’ of ‘cyberspace’ (his famous coinage) and its interpenetration of meatspace, he does this in a book - ‘a durable material substrate’ - in a more or less conventional novel, one in which, indeed, narrative predominates over character development and in which language functions in a relatively straightforward manner. Not even the narrative perspective (omniscient author third person) is shifted or experimentally inflected in any of Gibson’s cyberpunk classics. The writing is sharp and inventive but entirely subject to paraphrase.</p>
<p>There are further significant ironies here, for Hayles begins her essay by discussing typewriting. The physicality and static impression-making of this process of inscription is contrasted with that of word processing where less substantial bodily gestures cause word-as-(flickering)-image to be scanned onto the surface of a screen. “As I work with the text-as-flickering-image, I instantiate within my body the habitual patterns of movement that make pattern and randomness more real, more relevant, and more powerful than presence and absence” (Hayles, “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,” 26). However, the exemplar most present later in her argument, Gibson, has made some play of his preference for composing his novels using a typewriter. <cite id="note_^6">William Gibson (1948-) [Web site] (Guardian Unlimited, 2001 [cited February 2002]); available from <a href="http://books.guardian.co.uk/authors/author/0,5917,96528,00.html">http://books.guardian.co.uk/authors/author/0,5917,96528,00.html</a>. Michael Cunningham, The Virtual Tourist [a Short Interview with William Gibson] [Web site] (P45.net, 1996 [cited February 2002]); available from <a href="http://www.p45.net/dos_prompt/columns/3.html">http://www.p45.net/dos_prompt/columns/3.html</a>. “In real life, Gibson is actually the opposite of hi-tech. He maintains a high degree of goofy aloofness from the technologies he writes about in such obsessive detail - almost as if just using them would increase the risk of being somehow “infected” by them. He wrote his most famous novel, Neuromancer, on a 1927 olive-green Hermes portable typewriter, and only recently migrated to a battered old Apple Mac.” Gibson famously discussed his use of a typewriter in a phone interview for Playboy, August 30, 1996. “I do remember sitting with a blank sheet of paper and a typewriter going to ‘dataspace’ and ‘infospace’ and a couple of other clunkers, and then coming to ‘cyberspace’ thinking it sounds as though it means something.” I have touched on the question of Gibson’s and another influential contemporary novelist’s apparently conservative approach to, shall we say, avant-garde practice in a relatively early online work, John Cayley, “Why Did People Make Things Like This?” [Web site] (Electronic Book Review, 1997 [cited February 2002]); <a href="/electropoetics/speculative" class="internal">available from ebr</a></cite> Thus not only are the formal characteristics and the materiality of Gibson’s language at odds with the flickering signification of its represented content, but, at the very least, the once-preferred experience of this writer - his phenomenology of inscription - is an apparent denial of Hayles’ critical progression. I want to emphasise, in making these remarks, that if the subjective experience of the critic or reader is brought forward as evidence for a change in the structures of signification, then it is all the more important to examine the practices of the writer and the formal qualities of the work produced by those practices. Gibson sitting at a typewriter composing a novel may well produce a representation of the concept of flickering signification, but his practice does not necessarily embody the potential for new structures of meaning generation, or instantiate a corresponding materiality of language.</p>
<p>We will return to practice, but first I would like to examine Hayles’ flickering signifier in so far as it engages with the notion of code-as-text. <cite id="note_^7">Hayles, “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,” 31. The immediately following quotations, interspersed with my comments are from what I take to be a crucial paragraph in Hayles’ crucial article.</cite> “In informatics, the signifier can no longer be understood as a single marker, for example an ink mark on a page. Rather it exists as a flexible chain of markers bound together by the arbitrary relations specified by the relevant codes….” At least since Saussure, it seems somewhat redundant to point to the arbitrariness of any signifer-signified relation. I suppose that Hayles is actually referring to these relations as ‘arbitrary’ because they are not necessarily significant as human readings; they are not addressed to general human readers but only to the systems and systems-makers who have coded or specified them for certain purposes. They are, nonetheless, construable and are far from arbitrary when considered as addressed to the systems in which they are embedded. They have both significance and consequence. “…As I write these words on my computer, I see the lights on the video screen, but for the computer, the relevant signifiers are electronic polarities on disk….” That is, they are Kittler’s (fundamental) signifiers of voltage difference. “…Intervening between what I see and what the computer reads are the machine code that correlates these symbols with binary digits, the compiler language that correlates these symbols with higher-level instructions determining how the symbols are to be manipulated, the processing program that mediates between these instructions and the commands I give the computer, and so forth. A signifier on one level becomes a signifier on the next-higher level.” Hayles goes on to discuss the ‘astonishing power’ which these ‘arbitrary,’ hierarchically structured chains of codes generate, since manipulations, interpreted as commands at one level can have cascading, global effects. This is, presumably, ‘power’ in the now familiar technological sense, as used in the advertising and publicity for computer systems where, to relate the term with a more general or ‘Foucauldian’ sense, we may think of it as the <span class="lightEmphasis">power to alter the behaviour of a system</span> in an impressive manner or at great speed, etc. By shifting the argument in this way, I think she has bracketed a more significant consequence of the structure of signification which she is delineating: the question of address, the address of the specific encoded ‘levels.’</p>
<p>In an article on ‘digital code and literary text,’ Florian Cramer has pointed out that, as he somewhat obscurely puts it, “… the namespace of executable instruction code and nonexecutable code is flat.” <cite id="note_^8">Florian Cramer, <span class="booktitle">Digital Code and Literary Text</span> [Article in Web-based journal] (BeeHive Hypertext/Hypermedia Literary Journal, 2001 [cited February 2002]); available from <a href="http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps43/app_d.html">http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps43/app_d.html</a>.</cite> From the context his meaning is clear: that the same character or symbol set is used - for example - to transcribe both the text being word processed and (to be precise) the source code of the program which may be doing the word processing. On the level plains of letters and bits, there is no radical disjuncture in the symbolic media when we cross from a region of ‘executable’ text to text ‘for human consumption.’ From the human reader’s point of view, they are both more or less construable strings of letters; from the processing hardware’s point of view they are more or less construable sequences of voltage differences. On the one hand, this statement is related to the famous inter-media translatability of digitised cultural objects (once coded, regular procedures can be used to manipulate an image, a segment of audio, a text, etc. without distinction, disregarding the significance or affect of the manipulation). Cramer is, however, more concerned with the potential for sampling and mixing code and text (in the contemporary music sense). Again, as in Hayles’ analysis, the question of the address of specific code segments and texts is bracketed. Not only is it bracketed, but the range of positions of address is simplified, as if we are speaking of a flat letterspace for: code on the one hand and text on the other; whereas, clearly, there are many levels. Both Cramer and Hayles recognize a multi-level hierarchy of codes without elaborating or distinguishing them in the course of their discussions. Within the field of networked and programmable media, at the very least, we can acknowledge: machine codes, tokenised codes, low-level languages, high-level languages, scripting languages, macro languages, markup languages, Operating Systems and their scripting language, the Human Computer Interface, the procedural descriptions of software manuals, and a very large number of texts addressed to entirely human concerns. <cite id="note_^9">In passing it is worth highlighting the interface itself, particularly the ever-evolving HCI, as a complex programmable object with a structure like a language, including, in some cases, an underlying textual command-line interface which mirrors the now familiar mimetic and visual instantiation of users’ interface. This is another point for potential artistic intervention as well as an vital consideration when discussing the emergent rhetorics of new media, as Manovich has demonstrated so well, even introducing the powerful concept of ‘cultural interface’ (human-computer-culture interface) as an analytic tool. Manovich, <span class="booktitle">The Language of New Media</span> 62-115.</cite></p>
<p>For Cramer, and not only for Cramer, this simplified, bracketed, or ambiguous textual address has become a valorised aesthetic and even a political principle: “…computers and digital poetry might teach us to pay more attention to codes and control structures coded into all language. In more general terms, program code contaminates in itself two concepts which are traditionally juxtaposed and unresolved in modern linguistics: the structure, as conceived of in formalism and structuralism, and the performative, as developed by speech act theory” (Cramer, Digital Code and Literary Text.) To attempt a paraphrase: working or sampled or intermixed or collaged code, where it is presented as verbal art, is seen by Cramer to represent, in itself, a revelation of underlying, perhaps even concealed, structures of control, and also (because of its origins in operative, efficacious program code) to instantiate a genuinely ‘performative’ textuality, a textuality which ‘does’ something, which alters the behaviour of a system. It has the ‘astonishing power’ of other cultural manifestations of new technology and new media, the power that Hayles has also recognized as a function of the coded structures arranged at various ‘levels’ in programmatological systems, chained together by a literal topography, which is ‘flattened’ by a shared symbol set. We should pause to consider what this power amounts to. What are the systems whose behaviour can be altered by this power?</p>
<p>In the criticism of theoretically sophisticated poetics there is a parallel aesthetic and political agenda, which I am tempted to call the Reveal Code Aesthetic. It is partly documented and particularly well-represented in, for example, Marjorie Perloff’s <span class="booktitle">Radical Artifice</span>, where ‘reveal code’ is revealed as a project of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers such as Charles Berstein, after having been properly and correctly situated in the traditions of process-based, generative and/or constrained literature and potential literature by Modernist, OuLiPian, Fluxus and related writers culminating, for Perloff, in John Cage and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers themselves. <cite id="note_^10">Majorie Perloff, <span class="booktitle">Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media</span> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) 189. For a separate but related discussion of some of these issues, see John Cayley, Pressing the “Reveal Code” Key [Email-delivered, peer-reviewed periodical] (<span class="booktitle">EJournal</span>, 1996 [cited February 2002]); available from <a href="http://www.hanover.edu/philos/ejournal/archive/ej-6-1.txt">http://www.hanover.edu/philos/ejournal/archive/ej-6-1.txt</a>. The work of Emmett Williams and Jackson Mac Low, central to any assessment of the radical poetic artifice which she identifies, as also for the criticism of writing in networked and programmable media, is notable for its absence from Perloff’s book.</cite> Although the political and aesthetic of program of ‘reveal code’ appears to be shared with Cramer’s new media writers, in the context of Perloff’s poetics, the codes revealed and deconstructed in language <span class="foreignWord">per se</span> (rather than digitised textuality) are as much those of “the inaccessible system core,” the machinic devices that conceal “the systems that control the formats that determine the genres of our everyday life.” (<span class="booktitle">Radical Artifice</span> 188; Perloff is citing an earlier form of Charles Bernstein, “Play It Again, Pac-Man,”) While the progressive tenor of an aesthetic and political deconstruction underlies this project, there is something of a Luddite tone in Perloff. <cite id="note_^11">As more writers from this tradition make the move into ‘new media,’ this position begins to change. They become ‘new media writers’ ‘digital poets,’ etc. and attitudes perceptibly shift. Writers also, of course, become more sophisticated in their understanding of programmatological systems. This can be seen particularly in Charles Bernstein’s subsequent writing on digital media and also, for example, in the work of Loss Pequeño Glazier, who is closely associated with the poetic practice which has developed from the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E ‘school.’ See below, and, just-published, Loss Pequeño Glazier, <span class="booktitle">Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries</span> (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002). <a href="/electropoetics/e-poetry" class="internal">reviewed in ebr by Brandon Barr</a> The critical history of this (anti-)tradition in poetic literature is generally traced at least back to Mallarmé. A convenient source for its study can be found in the two-volume anthology: Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, eds., <span class="booktitle">Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, vol. 1: From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude</span> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, eds., <span class="booktitle">Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, vol. 2: From Postwar to Millennium</span> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).</cite> New media writers and artists necessarily have more ambiguous political and aesthetic relations with the control structures of the media which carry their work.</p>
<p>The code-revealing language artists discussed by Perloff, both in their work and in their performance - be it textual performance or performance art <span class="foreignWord">per se</span> or activism or (academic) critical practice - represent far better examples of the instantiation of pattern/randomness (distinguished from presence/absence) than the novelists cited by Hayles, even including Burroughs or Pynchon. While retaining her focus on the contemporary or near-contemporary writers which she associates with an innovative, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-inflected poetics having avant-garde inclinations, Perloff recalls an extensive tradition of poetic literature which is marked both by its attention to the materiality of language and its radicalisation of poetic practices. Perloff invokes formations and works by individuals which are also referred to by critics of writing in networked and programmable media. Like Cramer, she discusses the OuLiPo (<span class="foreignWord">Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle</span>), the working group inspired and once led by Raymond Quenueau, which is, perhaps, the primary reference for literary projects which are explicitly concerned with the application of algorithmic procedures, arbitrary constraint, generative or potential literature, and (relatively early) experimentation with the use of software. In doing so, she directly confronts the ‘repression’ of ‘numerical,’ generative procedures in poetry and poetics and turns to the work of John Cage as a cross-media figurehead. While only a minor aspect of his oeuvre, as compared with his major contribution to the art of (musical) sound, Cage’s mesostic texts, especially his ‘reading through’ of Pound and Joyce, stitch together a range of concerns - inter-media art, procedural composition, the rereading (and implicit deconstruction) of the High Modernists - which are highly relevant both to contemporary poetics and to writing in networked and programmable media. If Cage’s work is recalled in the context of the Fluxus movement (with which he is associated), then its relevance widens and deepens. Fluxus is a model of performative art practice (including explicitly literary practice) where the record of inscription is problematized (the work is an event, or the publication of a set of materials which must be manipulated by the reader/user), and where the presence/absence dialectic has been side-stepped by representations which may literally absent an artist-author. Perloff does not discuss Fluxus at length and so misses the opportunity to reassess and contextualize work by two of the most important practitioners of the ‘(numerical) repressed,’ Emmett Williams and Jackson Mac Low, both of whom deserve serious study as precursors if not ‘anticipatory plagiarists’ of writing in networked and programmable media. <cite id="note_^12">The term is (ironic) OuLiPian, used of any prior instantiation of work generated by a procedure which has subsequently been invented and specified by the OuLiPo. Such a discussion is beyond the scope of this essay.</cite> Fluxus also provides a historical, critical link to the traditions of visual and concrete poetics, which are discussed in Perloff’s account, particularly relevant work by Steve McCaffery and Joanna Drucker. The materiality of this work, considered as language art, visibly demonstrates a radical engagement with linguistic media and a requirement for the reader to engage with the codes - textual, rhetorical, paratextual, visual, etc. - by and of which the work is constituted.</p>
<p>If such prior work remains inadequately acknowledged in the discussion and reassessment of ‘codework,’ this may be, in part, simply because the traces of its inscriptions are captured and recorded in the ‘durable material substrates’ of print culture. Whereas Lacan’s ‘floating signification’ is read as an analytic metaphor, applied to language borne by a delivery media (print) on which the signs of the interface texts literally ‘rest’ (where they have been impressed) or, at best, ‘interleave,’ (they do not ‘float’), we read Hayles’ ‘flickering signifiers’ (as she encourages us to do) as literally ‘flickering,’ and constituent, as such, of text which has become ‘screenic.’ As such, it seems to exist elsewhere, not on the page but through the window of the screen in the informatic realm (Manovich, <span class="booktitle">The Language of New Media</span> 94-115. Undoubtedly, there are clear and historical distinctions of <span class="lightEmphasis">delivery media</span> for text. Nonetheless, we must be careful to distinguish the effects of delivery media on signification and affect from those produced by shifts in the <span class="lightEmphasis">compositional media</span>, and there is great congruence between the approach to compositional media of certain print-based writers (such as those discussed by Perloff, for example), and the potential use of compositional media which is suggested by new media, i.e. new delivery media. This <span class="lightEmphasis">potential</span> of text- and language-making is not necessarily engaged simply because new delivery media happen to be employed. <cite id="note_^13">The argument here is a rehearsal of the familiar but ever-important argument against art practice, particularly new media art practice, as media-specific or media-determined. Cramer’s essay makes similar points.</cite> The <span class="foreignWord">locus classicus</span> for a multi-layered, multi-level code-inflected writing and reading is, of course, Barthes’ <span class="booktitle">S/Z</span>, as Hayles explicitly acknowledges. <cite id="note_^14">Roland Barthes, <span class="booktitle">S/Z</span>, trans. Richard Miller (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990). N. Katherine Hayles, <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics</span> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) 46.</cite> <span class="booktitle">S/Z</span> was concerned with a short story programmed in ‘a persistent material substrate’ but Barthes was nonetheless able to demonstrate the potential for an iterative flickering of hermeneutic attention across structured linguistic codes, implying, I would argue, perfectly adequate complexity, mobility, and programmability in the compositional media. Barthes’ essay, after all, was not a demand for new media but a (re)call to new or latent ways of reading and writing.</p>
<p>We turn, nonetheless, to examples of what Cramer calls ‘codework.’ Cramer cites (amongst others) some of those writers in networked and programmable media whose work I, too, would consider in this context: Mez, Talan Memmott, Alan Sondheim, Jodi (references to specific works are given below). Leaving Jodi to one side for the moment, these are all artists who both work with code and make coded, programmatological objects. They are particularly known and notable for working code and code elements into what we might call the ‘interface text’ (the words which are available to be read by the human audiences they address). <cite id="note_^15">Although I do not make use of his analysis in this essay, it is well worth referring to Philippe Bootz’s analyses of systems-mediated textuality, where I believe my ‘interface text’ roughly corresponds to his ‘texte-à-voir.’ See Philippe Bootz, “Le point de vue fonctionnel: point de vue tragique et programme pilote,” <span class="booktitle">alire</span> 10 / DOC(K)S Series 3, no. 13/14/15/16 (1997).</cite> The result is a language which seems to be - depending on your perspective - enlivened or contaminated by code. In the rhetoric of this type of artistic production, contamination or infection (see Cramer as quoted above and Hayles below) is more likely to be the requisite association since transgression of the deconstructed systems of control is an implicit aspect of the aesthetic agenda. For the moment, however, we are more concerned with certain formal and material characteristics of the resulting language.</p>
<p>The language certainly reveals code and code elements, but what code does it reveal? What does it tell a code-naïve reader about the characteristics and the power of code? Is it, indeed, still code at all? At what level does it sit in the chained hierarchies of flickering signification? Has it been incorporated into the ‘interface text’ in a way which reflects its hierarchical origin, if it has one? Only if these and other questions can be given answers which specify how and why code is sampled in this writing would be it ‘codework’ in a strong sense. (Perhaps we should reserve Mez’s ‘code wurk’ for the weaker sense of code-contaminated language.) In the case of all of these writers (we’ll come to Jodi shortly) the code embedded in the interface text has ceased to be operative or even potentially operative. It is ‘broken’ in the now familiar programmer’s jargon. The breakdown of its operations eliminates one aspect of its proposed aesthetic value and allure, its native performative efficacy (which Cramer identified as a final throwaway without actually demonstrating or elaborating): the power of code to change the behaviour of a system. The code-as-text is more in the way of decoration or rhetorical flourish, the baroque euphuism of new media. This is not to say that - <span class="lightEmphasis">as part of the interface text</span> - it may not generate important significance and affect. In particular, the address of this type of intermixed, contaminated language is often concerned - as shown in the work of all of these writers - with issues of identity, gender, subjectivity, technology, technoscience, and the mutating and mutable influence they bring to bear on human lives and on human-human and human-machine relationships.</p>
<p>For the moment, however, we are more concerned with certain formal and material characteristics of the resulting language. In a recent conference paper, Hayles has discussed the language of Memmott’s <span class="booktitle">From lexia to perplexia</span> in terms of pidgins and creoles. “In this work the human face and body are re-coded with tags in a pidgin that we might call, rather than hypertext markup language, human markup language. Code erupts through the surface of the screenic text, infecting English with programming languages and resulting in a creole discourse that bespeaks an origin always already permeated by digital technologies.” <cite id="note_^16">N. Katherine Hayles, “Bodies of Texts, Bodies of Subjects: Metaphoric Networks in New Media” (paper presented at the Digital Arts and Culture conference, Providence, RI, 2001). This is cited from the version of the paper posted in PDF form before the conference. Please note: Hayles may well have revised it since.</cite> Similarly, Mez has characterized her textual production as written in a new “language/code system” which she calls ‘mezangelle.’ <cite id="note_^17">Mez, _the Data][H!][Bleeding T.Ex][E][Ts [Website] (2001 [cited February 2002]); available from <a href="http://netwurkerz.de/mez/datableed/complete/index.htm">http://netwurkerz.de/mez/datableed/complete/index.htm</a>. “the texts make use of the polysemic language/code system termed _mezangelle_, which evolved/s from multifarious email exchanges, computer code re:appropriation and net iconographs. to _mezangelle_ means to take words/wordstrings/sentences and alter them in such a way as to extend and enhance meaning beyond the predicted or the expected.”</cite> It is perhaps unfair to treat what may be metaphoric usages as literal; however, I believe this use of pidgin and creole is, in particular, a significant misdirection. A pidgin is a full-blown language, albeit arising from the encounter and hybridization of two or more existing languages; a creole is a pidgin which has become a first language for speakers raised by previous generations who have created or used a pidgin. The point here is that, in the case of a pidgin, the elements which combine to generate new language are commensurate - linguistic material is not simply being injected from one hierarchically and functionally distinct or programmatologically-operative symbolic sub-system (which is subsumed within a full-blown culture-bearing system of human language use) into another. The creation of a pidgin is, furthermore, the result of interactions by commensurate entities, i.e. humans. In the code-as-text which we have seen to date - in the texts of a reveal code aesthetic - human-specified code elements and segments are, typically, incorporated into what I have called the ‘interface text’ which is unambiguously and by definition an instance of some human-readable language. It may be contaminated, jargonized, disrupted language, but it is not a new language, not (yet) evidence for the invasion of an empire of machinic colonizers whose demands of trade and interaction require the creation of a pidgin by economically and linguistically disempowered human users. <cite id="note_^18">Not ‘(yet)’ as I say, although some might wish to try making the strong case for an emergent machinic culture, which is, I believe, a serious project although a misdirection in this context.</cite> The codeworks currently available to us extend, infect, and enhance natural language, but they do not create, for example, Code Pidgin English. <cite id="note_^19">As in the term ‘Chinese Pidgin English.’ Cf. for example, the discussion in Charles F. Hockett, <span class="booktitle">A Course in Modern Linguistics</span> (New York: Macmillan, 1958) 420-23.</cite></p>
<p>The code has ceased to function as code. The resulting text pretends an ambiguous address: at once to human reader and to machinic processor, but both human and machine must read the code as part of human discourse. We would not try to compile the code in the interface texts of Memmott, Mez or Sondheim. Nonetheless, this pretended ambiguity of address remains important to the aesthetics of this work. It assumes or encourages an investment on the part of its readers in the technology of new media and, especially, in the dissemination of textual art in new media. Thus, the experiences of the reader in these worlds can be brought to bear on their reading of the codework and they can appreciate, through more-or-less traditional hermeneutic procedures, the references and allusions to technology, technoscience and the issues with which they confront us. However, I would argue, if this pretended ambiguity of address exhausts the aesthetics and politics of a project (I am not saying that it does in any of these cases) then it leaves open questions of the work’s affect and significance when compared, for example, with previous poetic work in more durable material and linguistic substrates, some of which has been cited above.</p>
<p>The work of Sondheim needs to be singled out, in terms of practice and form, since his use of code is well-integrated into a long-term and wide-ranging language art project. The print-media version of <span class="booktitle">Jennifer</span>, for example, reads more in the tradition of innovative or avant-garde writing than as subsumed within codework or a reveal code aesthetic. <cite id="note_^20">Alan Sondheim, <span class="booktitle">Jennifer</span> (Salt Lake City: Nominative Press Collective, 1998). Eastern US: <a href="http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html;">http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html;</a> western US: <a href="http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt;">http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt;</a> additional images: <a href="http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/">http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/</a>. The internet references associated with this citation will lead on to Sondheim’s wider project.</cite> Most of the texts is this selection are manipulated language, but often using procedures which are not directly related to codes and processing. Thus, while his overt subject matter - mediated gender and sexuality, explicitly inflected by computing and technoscience - and his explicitly chosen media keep him immediately allied with codeworking colleagues, Sondheim’s work must also be read against earlier and contemporary writers working within or with a sense of the formally and aesthetically innovative traditions of poetics, and not only the poetics which intersects with Burroughs and Acker. With the implication that Sondheim’s writing needs to be judged as such and should not necessarily be granted a special credit of affect or significance because of its instantiation in new media.</p>
<p>In the necessity to read the work in both a programmatological context and in the broader context of innovative writing - though in this sense only - Sondheim’s engagement rhymes momentarily with that of Loss Pequeño Glazier. Glazier and his work represents a literal and explicit embodiment of “a set of relationships - relationships constituted by artistic practice - between a newly problematized linguistic materiality and represented content.” Glazier has produced a body of work, grounded in an existing writing practice, which has covered a wide range of potential forms for digital poetics and he has, moreover, documented and analysed this trajectory in a series of critical contributions. <cite id="note_^21">Most recently in the book gathering many of these papers and essays. Glazier, <span class="booktitle">Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries</span>. which, please note, includes a chapter devoted to “Coding Writing, Reading Code.” Glazier’s work has been done while he has also served as one of the motive forces and prime initiators of the major resource for innovative writing on the internet, the Electronic Poetry Center at the University of Buffalo, <a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu">http://epc.buffalo.edu</a>.</cite> Glazier’s work is characterized by his use of code and the language of code. In this, I believe, he affords himself significant ironies. He writes, for example: “The language you are breathing become the language you think… These are not mere metaphors but new procedures for writing. How could it be simpler? Why don’t we all think in UNIX? If we do, these ideas are a file: I am chmoding this file for you to have read, write, and execute permission - and please grep what you need from this! What I am saying is that innovative poetry itself is best suited to grep how technology factors language and how this technology, writing, and production are as inseparable as Larry, Moe, and Curly Java” (Glazier, <span class="booktitle">Digital Poetics</span> 31-32). This is discursive prose of a kind, but it is infected or contaminated by both code and poetry. Glazier doesn’t think in UNIX, nor would he ever wish to do so. But his language is not ‘mere metaphor’ (poetry is not metaphor) it is centred on language-making (what poetry is), and it demands a poetic practice which is alive to new procedures and new potential and which is sensitive to the changes this practice produces in the materiality of the language itself. Apart from its engagement with code and coding, Glazier’s work is also characterized by its bilingualism, or rather the multi-lingualism of ‘America’ in the sense of a Latin America which exists as historical and political soul and shadow throughout, arguably, the greater part of the United States. I raise this point to highlight distinctions in the way we may choose to consider the non-standard-English material in Glazier’s (and others’) texts, (while recalling Hayles’ metaphoric analysis via ‘pidgin’ and ‘creole’). In a Glazier text, there is a use of English intensified by an address to the materiality of language. There is the incorporation (in a strong sense, sometime <span class="lightEmphasis">within</span> the body of a word) of linguistic material from Spanish and other languages, especially those indigenous to Mexico. There is a similar incorporation of linguistic material from code and from computing jargons. <cite id="note_^22">See: Loss Pequeño Glazier, “White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares” [Javascripted algorithmic text on website] (Electronic Poetry Center, 2001 [cited February 2002]); available from <a href="http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/glazier/java/costa1/00.html">http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/glazier/java/costa1/00.html</a>. This relatively recent work illustrates my specific points but also demonstrates that Glazier has been exploring the properly programmatological dimension of writing in networked and programmable media with, for example, kinetic and algorithmic texts. A classified selection of texts is at: <a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier/e-poetry/">http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier/e-poetry/</a>.</cite> But whereas the use of other natural language material evokes significance and affect which is commensurate with human concerns - personal, political, social and cultural history, etc. - the use of ‘codewords’ evokes other concerns, closer to questions of technology and the technology of language. Glazier would rather think in Nahuatl than in UNIX, but in practice he prefers to think in P=O=E=T=R=Y.</p>
<p>Jodi takes us to another point in the textonomy of code-as-text, a relatively extreme position where code-as-text is, perhaps, all there is. <cite id="note_^23">Jodi is the very well-known, long-standing net.art project of Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans. Jodi, <a href="http://www.jodi.org">www.jodi.org</a> [Website] (Jodi, 1980- [cited February 2002]); available from <a href="http://www.jodi.org">http://www.jodi.org</a>.</cite> It is difficult to say anything hard and fast in terms of more-or-less conventional criticism about a site which is hardly ever the same on successive visits. Instead, I want to refer to what I remember of a visit in which a dynamic html- and javascript-mediated experience proved to have been delivered by html source which was, itself, a work of ASCII art. <cite id="note_^24">The practice of composing ASCII symbols, usually displayed as monospaced fonts for regularity, in order to generate imagery. In Jodi’s case this was abstract or verging on the abstract whereas, popularly, ASCII art has been figurative.</cite> Here, the actual code is a text, an artistic text. However, the code is not, in this instance, working code (at least not ‘hard-working,’ shall we say). It is comprised of code segments which are ignored in the browser’s interpretation and rendering of the html. The syntax of this markup language is particularly easy to manipulate or appropriate in this way because comments (ignored by any interpreter, by definition) may be extensive and because interpreters (browsers in this case) are, typically, programmed to ignore any&lt;tagged&lt;thing which they cannot render. The code works, but it is not all working code. Again it represents only a pretended ambiguity of address: its primary structures of signification were never meant for a machine or a machinic process.</p>
<p>I, too, have made a few ‘codeworks’ of a not dissimilar kind. By extracting and manipulating segments of the close-to-natural-language, very-high-level, interpreted programming language, HyperTalk, I was able to make human-readable texts which are also segments of interpretable, working code:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">on write<br /> repeat twice<br /> do “global ” &amp; characteristics<br /> end repeat<br /> repeat with programmers = one to always<br /> if touching then<br /> put essential into invariance<br /> else<br /> put the round of simplicity * engineering / synchronicity + one into invariance<br /> end if<br /> if invariance &gt; the random of engineering and not categorical then<br /> put ideals + one into media<br /> if subversive then<br /> put false into subversive<br /> end if<br /> if media &gt; instantiation then<br /> put one into media<br /> end if<br /> else<br /> put the inscription of conjunctions + one into media<br /> end if<br /> if categorical then put false into categorical<br /> put media into ideals<br /> put word media of field “text” of card understanding &amp; “text” into potential<br /> if the mouse is down then<br /> put conjunctions into potential<br /> put potential into card field agents<br /> put true into encoded<br /> exit repeat<br /> end if<br /> inflect<br /> wait manipulation<br /> put potential into conjunctions<br /> put ideals into world<br /> if performed then put false into performed<br /> if programmers are greater than control and media &amp; comma is in field computer of card understanding &amp; “text” then exit repeat<br /> end repeat<br /> if not encoded and not touching then<br /> if ideals are developed then wait five seconds<br /> lock screen<br /> put empty into card field agents<br /> put empty into card field system<br /> do “unlock screen with dissolve” &amp; fantasies<br /> end if<br /> end write <cite id="note_^25">Cayley, <span class="booktitle">Pressing the “Reveal Code” Key</span>. The variable terms in this code were randomly and systematically replaced with substantive words from the text on which the procedure operates - any noun or adjective was allowed to replace a variable name containing a value; any verb replaced a procedure or function name. HyperTalk ‘reserved words’ were left intact. The code is working code.</cite></p>
<p>This text has genuinely ambiguous address - to a HyperTalk interpreter and to human readers. It could (and does, in some versions of the software) alter the behaviour of a system, when included as one routine in a text generator. Its address to human concerns is clearly ludic and, perhaps, pretends more than it delivers in terms of significance and affect, but at least we can say, with little qualification, that this code is the text.</p>
<p>But where is such a codetext going, in terms, for instance, of its formal and rhetorical characteristics, in terms of its specific materiality? As a text - let us provisionally call it a poetic text in the sense of a text which implies some trial of language - which is addressed to human readers, it has distinct limitations, constraints which disallow or compromise its engagement with broader and more traditional concerns or sources of cultural value. Nonetheless, for me, it suggests new or newly highlighted rhetorical strategies which are specific to the materiality of language in networked and programmable media. For the moment, I will identify two such rhetorical fields of play: 1) the direct confrontation of strict logical-syntactic symbolic composition (programming <span class="foreignWord">per se</span>) with natural language syntax and argument, and 2) what I think of as a potential ‘aesthetics of compilation’: the creation of linguistic or symbolic constructs which are designed, for example, to be read in one mode of address and at one level of code in a chained hierarchy of symbolic systems, while simultaneously intended for compilation into a systematically related code at a different level within the hierarchy, with a different mode of address.</p>
<p>The first of these rhetorical fields represents an age-old and persistent problem: that, indeed, of logic v. rhetoric, although recast in specific proliferating instances of logic-as-literature in new media. There is no time or space in this shortly closing essay to take this on. <cite id="note_^26">But I raise it, in part, thanks to remarks by Nick Monfort to be published along with a forthcoming paper of mine, John Cayley, “Literal Art: Neither Lines nor Pixels but Letters,” in <span class="booktitle">First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game</span>, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming 2002). As I was finishing this essay I came across Hugh Kenner’s highly interesting reading of “Beckett Thinking.” Kenner examines Beckett’s writing in terms of strict, exhaustive logical procedure in an essay which includes paraphrases coded in the programming language Pascal. Hugh Kenner, <span class="booktitle">The Mechanic Muse</span> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) 85-105.</cite> Compilation in language and literature, however, directly addresses the interrelation of code and text; and it seems to me to be a good example of a rhetorical concept, hitherto of little use where literary objects were inscribed in persistent and durable material substrates, but of great potential in a literature constituted by flickering signification. Texts are already being made to be compiled, decompiled, recompiled, and so on.</p>
<p>I may have seemed to be arguing with flickering signification, by giving examples of writing which appeared to demonstrate its structures of code and text in systematically linked hierarchies, and then showing that these structures were collapsed in many of the examples to hand. In fact, I believe that the structures Hayles identifies and characterises are clearly operative in writing in networked and programmable media, just as they are operative in certain types of innovative poetic practice. The writing of flickering signification does, indeed, contribute to changes in the body of literature, the literary corpus, both its ‘material substrate’ and its ‘codes of representation.’ However, rather than the intermixing and mutual contamination of code and text, we require not only a maintenance and practical understanding of the distinction between code and text, we need at least the same range and fineness of distinction as that which exists among all the levels of programmatological languages and codes. The ‘power’ - including any affect and significance discoverable by interpretation - which such structures of signification generate is dependent on these distinctions, and on the compilation procedures (which I propose as rhetorical) by which they are systematically related. This ‘power’ is also, typically in this context, dependent on the concealment - the hidden working - of the code which is thus allowed to serve its function as <span class="lightEmphasis">program</span>, to generate the text and offer it - iteratively, repeatedly, indeterminately - for instances of potential performance, including the familiar performance of reading.</p>
<p>In her discussion of the flickering signifier and its filial relation to the floating precursor of Lacan, <span class="lightEmphasis">mutation</span> is the resultant process of a dialectic implied by a new structure of signification, a parallel term for <span class="lightEmphasis">castration</span> in Lacan’s analysis. Mutation is “a decisive event in the psycholinguistics of information. Mutation is the catastrophe in the pattern/randomness dialectic analogous to castration in the presence/absence dialectic” (Hayles, “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,” 33). Mutation - which evokes change, movement, the kinetic potential of text in new media, the mimetic engagement of literature with the culture of human time - mutation is indeed a generative catastrophe for ‘literature’ in the sense of immutable, authoritative corpus. As writing in networked and programmable media, language and literature mutate over time and as time-based art, according to programs of coded texts which are embedded and concealed in their structures of flickering signification. For the code to function as generator, as programmaton, as manipulator of the text, it must, typically, be a distinct part of the global textual system; it must be possible to recompile the codes as operative procedures, as aspects of live-art textual practice. The code is not the text.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"> </p>
<h2>*</h2>
<p>And now, indulge your loop aesthetic and take the simple, ever-implicit link back to the paragraphs that introduced this critique. Read them as if they were some instance of a provisional conclusion.</p>
<h2>works cited</h2>
<p>Aarseth, Espen. <span class="booktitle">Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature</span>. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1997.</p>
<p>Barthes, Roland. <span class="booktitle">S/Z</span>. Translated by Richard Miller. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990.</p>
<p>Bernstein, Charles. “Play It Again, Pac-Man.” <span class="booktitle">Postmodern Culture</span> 2, no. 1 (1991): a reworking of ‘Hot circuits: a video arcade,’ <span class="booktitle">American Museum of the Moving Image</span>, 14 June-26 November 1989.</p>
<p>Bootz, Philippe. “Le point de vue fonctionnel: point de vue tragique et programme pilote.” <span class="booktitle">alire</span> 10 / DOC(K)S Series 3, no. 13/14/15/16 (1997): 28-47.</p>
<p>Cayley, John. “Literal Art: Neither Lines nor Pixels but Letters.” In <span class="booktitle">First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game</span>, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming 2002.</p>
<p>——. “Pressing the ‘Reveal Code’ Key” [Email-delivered, peer-reviewed periodical]. <a href="http://www.hanover.edu/philos/ejournal/archive/ej-6-1.txt" class="outbound">EJournal</a>, 1996 [cited February 2002]. Available from <a href="http://www.hanover.edu/philos/ejournal/archive/ej-6-1.txt">http://www.hanover.edu/philos/ejournal/archive/ej-6-1.txt</a>.</p>
<p>——. “Why Did People Make Things Like This?” [Web site]. <a href="http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/speculative" class="internal">Electronic Book Review</a>, 1997 [cited February 2002].</p>
<p>Cramer, Florian. “Digital Code and Literary Text” [Article in Web-based journal]. <a href="http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps43/app_d.html" class="outbound">BeeHive Hypertext/Hypermedia Literary Journal</a>, 2001 [cited February 2002]. Available from <a href="http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps43/app_d.html">http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps43/app_d.html</a>.</p>
<p>Cunningham, Michael. <a href="http://www.p45.net/dos_prompt/columns/3.html" class="outbound">The Virtual Tourist</a> [a Short Interview with William Gibson] [Web site]. P45.net, 1996 [cited February 2002]. Available from <a href="http://www.p45.net/dos_prompt/columns/3.html">http://www.p45.net/dos_prompt/columns/3.html</a>.</p>
<p>Glazier, Loss Pequeño. <span class="booktitle">Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries</span>. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.</p>
<p>——. “White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares” [Javascripted algorithmic text on website]. <a href="http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/glazier/java/costa1/00.html" class="outbound">Electronic Poetry Center</a>, 2001 [cited February 2002]. Available from <a href="http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/glazier/java/costa1/00.html">http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/glazier/java/costa1/00.html</a>.</p>
<p>Hayles, N. Katherine. “Bodies of Texts, Bodies of Subjects: Metaphoric Networks in New Media.” Paper presented at the Digital Arts and Culture conference, Providence, RI 2001.</p>
<p>——. <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics</span>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.</p>
<p>——. “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers.” In <span class="booktitle">Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation</span>, edited by Timothy Druckery, 259-77. New York: Aperture, 1996.</p>
<p>——. “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers.” In <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics</span>, 25-49. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.</p>
<p>Hockett, Charles F. <span class="booktitle">A Course in Modern Linguistics</span>. New York: Macmillan, 1958.</p>
<p>Jodi. <a href="http://www.jodi.org" class="outbound">www.jodi.org</a> [Website]. Jodi, 1980- [cited February 2002]. Available from <a href="http://www.jodi.org">http://www.jodi.org</a>.</p>
<p>Kenner, Hugh. <span class="booktitle">The Mechanic Muse</span>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.</p>
<p>Kittler, Friedrich. “There Is No Software.” In <span class="booktitle">Literature Media Information Systems</span>, edited by John Johnston, 147-55. Amsteldijk: G+B Arts International, 1997.</p>
<p>Manovich, Lev. <span class="booktitle">The Language of New Media</span>. Edited by Roger F. Malina, Leonardo. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.</p>
<p>Mez. <a href="http://netwurkerz.de/mez/datableed/complete/index.htm" class="outbound">_the Data][H!][Bleeding T.Ex][E][Ts</a> [Website]. 2001 [cited February 2002]. Available from <a href="http://netwurkerz.de/mez/datableed/complete/index.htm">http://netwurkerz.de/mez/datableed/complete/index.htm</a>.</p>
<p>Perloff, Majorie. <span class="booktitle">Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media</span>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.</p>
<p>Rothenberg, Jerome, and Pierre Joris, eds. <span class="booktitle">Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry. Vol. 2: From Postwar to Millennium</span>. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.</p>
<p>——, eds. <span class="booktitle">Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry. Vol. 1: From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude</span>. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.</p>
<p>Sondheim, Alan. <span class="booktitle">Jennifer</span>. Salt Lake City: Nominative Press Collective, 1998.</p>
<p>Ulmer, Gregory L. <span class="booktitle">Applied Grammatology: Post(E)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys</span>. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985.</p>
<p>William Gibson (1948-) [Web site]. <a href="http://books.guardian.co.uk/authors/author/0,5917,96528,00.html" class="outbound">Guardian Unlimited, 2001</a> [cited February 2002]. Available from <a href="http://books.guardian.co.uk/authors/author/0,5917,96528,00.html">http://books.guardian.co.uk/authors/author/0,5917,96528,00.html</a>.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/codework">codework</a>, <a href="/tags/net-art">Net Art</a>, <a href="/tags/literary">literary</a>, <a href="/tags/literal">literal</a>, <a href="/tags/poet">poet</a>, <a href="/tags/poeti">poeti</a>, <a href="/tags/emergen">emergen</a>, <a href="/tags/poetics">poetics</a>, <a href="/tags/utopia">utopia</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodern">postmodern</a>, <a href="/tags/program">program</a>, <a href="/tags/new-media">new media</a>, <a href="/tags/rhetoric">rhetoric</a>, <a href="/tags/compil">compil</a>, <a href="/tags/logic">logic</a>, <a href="/tags/game">game</a>, <a href="/tags/composition">composition</a>, <a href="/tags/instrument">instrument</a>, <a href="/tags/hayles">hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/rayley">rayley</a>, <a href="/tags/material">material</a>, <a href="/tags/flickering-signifier">flickering signifier</a>, <a href="/tags/mediati">mediati</a>, <a href="/tags/florian-cramer">florian cramer</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator811 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/literal#commentsMateriality and Matter and Stuff: What Electronic Texts Are Made Ofhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/sited
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Matthew G. Kirschenbaum</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2001-10-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/electropoetics/cyberdebates">Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>I’ve found both sides of the exchange about what cybertext theory can and can’t do useful and stimulating. I’m grateful to <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> and the various participants. Here I want to push the discussion of “materiality,” a word used by both Markku Eskelinen and Katherine Hayles, and a word I myself have been using since I started writing about digital media in the mid-1990s. For materiality does indeed matter, as <a href="../electropoetics/ecumenical" class="internal">Hayles</a> has said. This is precisely the point I make (and a phrase I use) in an article forthcoming in the journal <span class="journaltitle">TEXT</span> that examines the textual condition of what I call “first generation electronic objects” - a class of artifacts that have no material existence outside of computational file systems, which would include electronic fiction and poetry, and other types of hypertext and cybertext works. <cite id="note_1">1.See Kirschenbaum, “Editing the Interface: Textual Studies and First Generation Electronic Objects.” TEXT 14 (2002): 15-51. Portions of my remarks here are adapted from this article.</cite></p>
<p>I would maintain that neither hypertext theory nor cybertext theory yet talks about the materiality of first generation electronic objects with anything near the precision or sophistication scholars habitually bring to bear on more traditional objects of literary or cultural studies. I know because I work in an English department (one of those tweedy professors Eskelinen scoffs at); and while I consider myself a media critic as much as a literary critic, I think I’ve learned a thing or two from my literary colleagues that may help us bridge that particular digital divide. Most readers of this discussion, for instance, have probably had an occasion to refer to Michael Joyce’s <span class="booktitle">afternoon</span>, but that text’s colophon acknowledges it has been published in no less than six different versions and editions over the years, with some substantial variants between them. Which <span class="booktitle">afternoon</span> do we really mean then? And does it <span class="lightEmphasis">matter</span>? Of course it does, or at least it should. A comparison of copies of the first (1987) and third (1992) editions of <span class="booktitle">afternoon</span>, for example, reveals a number of immediately observable differences: the third edition includes a bitmapped graphic on its electronic frontispiece; the number of textual nodes has increased marginally, from 536 to 539; the number of links, however, has increased by nearly a hundred, from 854 to 951. The electronic size of the work has also grown, from 235 kilobytes in the first edition to 375 kilobytes in the third. There are also marked differences in the text’s presentation across platforms: one might note that the appearance of the <span class="booktitle">afternoon</span> desktop icon differs dramatically between the Mac and PC. Look:</p>
<p> <span style="width: 100%; text-align: center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/mac.gif" width="36" height="33" /></span><br /><span class="caption">The afternoon icon (Mac); Copyright 1990 Eastgate Systems</span> </p>
<p> <span style="width: 100%; text-align: center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/greypc.gif" width="34" height="34" /></span><br /><span class="caption">The afternoon icon (PC); Copyright 1993 Eastgate Systems</span> </p>
<p>Literary scholars regularly edit (and also <a href="../criticalecologies/archival" class="internal">remediate</a>) the texts of the past to ensure the persistence of literary canons, but how would one edit <span class="websitetitle">afternoon</span>, historically important for its status as the first full-length work of electronic fiction? Would one do it in <span class="lightEmphasis">print</span>, as the <span class="booktitle">Norton Anthology of Postmodern Fiction</span> has done? As a software emulation of the original Storyspace environment, as Norton’s Web-deliverable version of that same anthology tried to do, using JavaScript to recreate the behavior of guard fields and the like? By running an authentic copy of <span class="websitetitle">afternoon</span> on an antique Mac, lovingly preserved in a climate-controlled computer lab, with access to the mouse and keyboard restricted to credentialed scholars conducting serious archival research? By using only non-proprietary data standards like XML/XSL, distributed under the terms of the open source community’s General Public License? These questions have been touched on before, particularly in the arena of digital preservation, but I pose them here with a broader agenda in mind. In particular, I want to ask what it means to treat an electronic text such as <span class="websitetitle">afternoon</span> as a textual artifact subject to material and historical forms of understanding.</p>
<p>To ask such questions - in effect, to take electronic texts seriously as texts - lays the groundwork for a theory of electronic textuality that departs widely from the existing approaches to the subject. The community that I believe has furnished us with the best accounts of texts and textual phenomena is neither hypertext theory nor cybertext theory, but the textual studies community. By “the textual studies community” I mean those scholars who practice textual criticism to produce critical editions as well as those who practice descriptive or analytic bibliography. Over the last fifteen to twenty years, this community has been the scene of an intense theoretical conversation on the nature of texts, textual transmission, and textual representation. A very selective list of participants in that conversation might include Betty T. Bennett, George Bornstein, Morris Eaves, Neil Fraistat, D. C. Greetham, Joseph Grigely, Jerome J. McGann, D. F. McKenzie, James McLaverty, Randall McLeod, Peter Shillingsberg, Martha Nell Smith, G. Thomas Tanselle, and <a href="http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr6/6werner/6wern.htm" class="outbound">Marta Werner</a> among the many others who have published in the pages of <span class="journaltitle">Studies in Bibliography</span>, <span class="journaltitle">TEXT</span>, and the anthologies that have appeared since the mid-1980s. Yet this work has remained mostly invisible to hypertext and cybertext criticism and theory, despite some obvious shared interests.</p>
<p>Given the origins of textual criticism and bibliography in the study of printed matter like manuscripts and books, the premise that its deliberations are relevant to digital content may seem odd and counter-intuitive. But in fact, textual criticism and bibliography should be recognized as among the most sophisticated branches of media studies we have evolved. Only the most literal-minded reader could think that because they have historically focused on parchment and paper these disciplines have nothing to say to the new artifacts and technologies of the digital age. (And here I must say that Eskelinen’s apparent ignorance of textual studies makes his remarks about English professors seem all the more parochial.)</p>
<p>Let me develop some sense of what textual studies has to offer to the present exchange. Michael Joyce is fond of the maxim: “Print stays itself; electronic text replaces itself.” <cite id="note_2">2.Michael Joyce, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 232.</cite> Likewise, Jay David Bolter, in his widely read study <span class="booktitle">Writing Space</span>, asserts:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Electronic text is the first text in which the elements of meaning, of structure, and of visual display are fundamentally unstable…. This restlessness is inherent in a technology that records information by collecting for fractions of a second evanescent electrons at tiny junctures of silicon and metal. All information, all data in the computer world is a kind of controlled movement, and so the natural inclination of computer writing is to change, to grow, and finally to disappear. <cite id="note_3">3. Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991), 31.</cite></p>
<p>I use these examples from two of hypertext’s most prominent critics and theorists because they echo common refrains in much of the current writing about electronic textuality: that it is fundamentally volatile and unstable, and that these characteristics are themselves the product of the radical new ontologies of the medium. But is that really the most salient point? Textual scholars, after all, have long understood that all texts (and not just electronic texts) are capable of “replacing themselves”; nor is it actually true (if one inverts Bolter’s formulations above) that elements of meaning, of structure, and of visual display in <span class="lightEmphasis">printed</span> texts are fundamentally stable. The opposition between fixed, reliable printed texts on the one hand, and fluid and dynamic electronic texts on the other - an opposition encouraged by the putative immateriality of digital data storage - is patently false, yet it has become a truism in the nascent field of electronic textual theory. Marie-Laure Ryan, for example, in a recent essay on “Cyberspace, Virtuality, and the Text,” undertakes to list some of the defining characteristics of printed versus electronic media. In her first column (print), Ryan includes such words as: “durable,” “unity,” “order,” “monologism,” “sequentiality,” “solidity,” and “static.” In her second column (the virtual) she opposes these with: “ephemeral [the very first item on the list],” “diversity,” “chaos,” “dialogism,” “parallelism,” “fluidity,” and “dynamic.” <cite id="note_4">4. Marie-Laure Ryan, “Cyberspace, Virtuality, and the Text,” Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 101-2.</cite> I cite <a href="../criticalecologies/relativizing" class="internal">Ryan</a> (whose work I generally admire) because it is an example of the extent to which otherwise perceptive observers of the new media have failed to take notice of the most basic lessons textual studies has to teach. Ask a <span class="booktitle">Beowulf</span> scholar whether printed matter is really “durable” or “orderly” (the sole surviving manuscript of the poem was thrown singed and smoldering from a window during a library fire in the early 18th century, rendering portions of it illegible) or a Wordsworthean whether the texts of <span class="booktitle">The Prelude</span> (there are four of them, a two-book, a five-book, a thirteen-book, and a fourteen-book version) are “static” and exhibit “unity.” Those are <span class="lightEmphasis">not</span>special cases (pedantic exceptions to some normative textual condition), and the tendency to elicit what is “new” about new media by contrasting its radical mutability with the supposed material solidity of older textual forms is a misplaced gesture, symptomatic of the general extent to which textual studies and digital studies have failed to communicate.</p>
<p>If we acknowledge that printed texts do not “stay themselves,” we should also ask what it means for electronic texts to “replace themselves.” The critical discourse surrounding digital technologies - often taking its cues from post-structuralism - has embraced their putative ephemerality, as if we must surrender ourselves to the eventual loss of our most precious data in order to realize the medium to its full potential. I want to suggest that there is a kind of “Romantic ideology” at work in this view of electronic textuality, and that it is a view which we can ill afford to maintain much longer. <cite id="note_5">5. “Romantic ideology” is Jerome McGann’s phrase.</cite> First, there are the pressing questions of digital preservation I touched on above: sooner or later “the natural inclination” of electronic information “to change, to grow, and to finally disappear” will cease to function as an aesthetic conceit and become instead a full-blown cultural crisis (from many perspectives it already has). Moreover, recent critical work by scholars such as Johanna Drucker and D. C. Greetham should lead us to question language such as “restless,” “fractions of a second,” “evanescent electrons,” and above all “natural inclination,” for such language serves to mystify what are in fact exquisitely precise, calculated, and controlled processes at the computational level. Drucker, for example, unequivocally pinpoints the material basis of digital objects simply by following the kind of reference Bolter makes to “tiny junctures of silicon and metal” to its logical conclusion:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">“Code” always contains a stored electronic sequence that includes the address of any particular piece of information - thus the binary sequence, the ultimate “difference” which constitutes the identity of any data in code storage, is also always topographic, place specific, sited, and thus a location within the mapped territory of the machine’s circuit/real estate. <cite id="note_6">6.Johanna Drucker, “The Ontology of the Digital Image,” Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print, eds. Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux and Neil Fraistat (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). Quotation here is from a draft copy supplied to me by Drucker, manuscript page 18.</cite></p>
<p>Likewise, Greetham demonstrates the painstaking story-boarding and mouse-driven manipulations that must be brought to bear in order to bring off even a modest display of a supposedly spontaneous digital effect such as morphing. <cite id="note_7">7. See Greetham, “Is it Morphin’ Time?” Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory. Ed. Katheryn Sutherland. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.</cite> Much the same could also be said of hypertext fiction: as anyone who has ever used Storyspace will know, its Barthesian “writerly texts” (<a href="../writingpostfeminism/piecemeal" class="internal">celebrated</a>by critics such as George Landow) are the product of non-trivial authorial effort to create links, guard fields, and so forth.</p>
<p>Hayles is right that it is easy to snipe at the positions of earlier critics, and she is certainly right that their initial contributions are profoundly enabling, in that they are necessary for the field’s ongoing work. I am simply suggesting that in the long run we do electronic fiction and our critical understanding of electronic textuality no favors by romanticizing the medium through a dated discourse of play that is really only screen deep. I contend that textual criticism and bibliography offer an alternative to post-structuralist discourse precisely because these disciplines provide us with the intellectual precedents and critical tools to account for first generation electronic objects as functions of the material and historical dimensions that obtain for <span class="lightEmphasis">all</span> artifacts. Significantly, a bibliographical/textual approach calls upon us to emphasize precisely those aspects of electronic textuality that have thus far been neglected in the critical writing about the medium: platform, interface, data standards, file formats, operating systems, versions and distributions of code, patches, ports, and so forth. <span class="lightEmphasis">For that’s the stuff electronic texts are made of</span>.</p>
<p>To a casual observer, such an agenda may sound dreary indeed, as dry as talk of lemmatization or collation formulas is to many of my literary colleagues. But we should keep in mind, as Jerome McGann writes, that bibliographical and textual studies are “the only disciplines that can elucidate the complex network of people, materials, and events that have produced and that continue to reproduce the literary works that history delivers into our hands.” <cite id="note_8">8. Jerome J. McGann. “The Monks and the Giants: Textual and Bibliographical Studies and the Interpretation of Literary Works,” Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 191.</cite> The relevance of that “complex network of people, materials, and events” that lies behind textual production is only amplified in electronic settings (this present exchange is a case in point). By contrast, we might call the belief that electronic objects are immaterial simply because we cannot reach out and touch them the “haptic fallacy.” So, my aim is not to sap the excitement of the new medium by confining its discussion to clinical arcana, but rather to demonstrate the extent to which ignoring the material basis of electronic objects only obscures their media and their make-up.</p>
<p>(Read <a href="../electropoetics/pragmatic" class="internal">Scott Rettberg’s</a> and <a href="../electropoetics/ecumenical" class="internal">N. Katherine Hayles’s</a> responses to Eskelinen and others.)</p>
<p>(Further discussion of electronic literature can be sent to <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span>.)</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/hayles">hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/kirschenbaum">kirschenbaum</a>, <a href="/tags/matter">matter</a>, <a href="/tags/materiality">materiality</a>, <a href="/tags/cybertext">cybertext</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/eskelinen">eskelinen</a>, <a href="/tags/cyberdebates">cyberdebates</a>, <a href="/tags/elo">elo</a>, <a href="/tags/electronic-literature">electronic literature</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator830 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/sited#commentsMedia, Genealogy, Historyhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/archival
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
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<div class="field-item even">Matthew G. Kirschenbaum</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1999-03-15</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> is an important book. Its co-authors, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, seem self-conscious of this from the outset. The book’s subtitle, for example, suggests their intent to contend for the mantle of Marshall McLuhan, who all but invented media studies with <span class="booktitle">Understanding Media</span> (1964), published twenty years prior to the mass-market release of the Apple Macintosh and thirty years prior to the popular advent of the World-Wide Web. There has also, I think, been advance anticipation for <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> among the still relatively small coterie of scholars engaged in serious cultural studies of computing and information technology. Bolter and Grusin both teach in Georgia Tech’s School of Language, Communication, and Culture, the academic department which perhaps more than any other has attempted a wholesale make-over of its institutional identity in order to create an interdisciplinary focal point for the critical study of new media. Grusin in fact chairs LCC, and Bolter, who holds an endowed professorship at Tech, is a highly-regarded authority for his work on the hypertext authoring system StorySpace and for an earlier study, <span class="booktitle">Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing</span> (1992), to which <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> is a sequel of sorts. [ <span class="lightEmphasis">Bolter’s book is <a href="/imagenarrative/writingspace" class="internal">reviewed by Anne Burdick</a> in ebr, eds.</span> ] The book therefore asks to be read and received as something of an event, an extended statement from two senior scholars who have been more deeply engaged than most in defining and institutionalizing new media studies.</p>
<p>Much of <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> ‘s importance is lodged in the title word itself. New media studies has been subjected to a blizzard of neologisms and new terminologies - many of them over-earnest at best - as scholars have struggled to invent a critical vocabulary adequate to discuss hypertexts and myriad other artifacts of digital culture with the same degree of cogency found in a field such as film studies. Bolter and Grusin clearly want “remediation” (the word) to stick, and the volume’s rhetorical momentum is often driven by simple declarative clauses like “By remediation we mean…” and “By remediation we do not mean…” Though the cumulative weight of these phrasings helps remind readers that they are in the presence of two critics in full command of their subject matter, the repetitive stress on “remediation” also produces some odd moments, such as this one from the preface:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">It was in May 1996, in a meeting in his office with Sandra Beaudin that RG was reported to have coined the term <span class="lightEmphasis">remediation</span> as a way to complicate the notion of “repurposing” that Beaudin was working with for her class project. But, as most origin stories go, it was not until well after the fact, when Beaudin reported the coinage to JB, who later reminded RG that he had coined the term, that the concept of “remediation” could be said to have emerged. Indeed, although the term <span class="lightEmphasis">remediation</span> was coined in RG’s office, neither of us really knew what it meant until we had worked out together the double logic of immediacy and hypermediacy. (viii)</p>
<p>[ <span class="lightEmphasis">Bolter’s more recent collaboration with Diane Gromala, Windows and Mirrors (2003) applies the concept of immediacy/hypermediacy to graphic design. See Jan Baetens’ <a href="/imagenarrative/designflaw" class="internal">ebr review</a></span> ]</p>
<p>This is writing that itself bears the mark of multiple mediations, from the willfully passive construction of its syntax (“that RG was reported to have coined…”) to the flutter of the keyword remediation from an italicized presentation to scare quotes and back again. I dwell on such details not to be clever, but rather because those visible stress-marks, and the placement of this vignette in the volume’s preface (where it is labeled, tongue-in-cheek, as an “origin story”) both underscore the extent to which language itself is about to be recycled and repurposed in the project that follows. For remediation is not in fact a neologism or a new coinage but rather a paleonym, a word already in use that is recast in wider or different terms: remediation is a word commonly encountered in business, educational, and environmental contexts to denote remedy or reform. Bolter and Grusin do acknowledge this later in the book by discussing remediation’s usage by educators (59), but “remediation” (the word’s) status as a paleonym itself becomes questionable when we realize that Bolter and Grusin clearly expect <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> (the book) to perform exactly this kind of reformative work - most broadly as a corrective to the prevailing notion of the “new” in new media.</p>
<p>For all of this anxiety surrounding its presentation and pedigree, remediation in Bolter and Grusin’s hands is a simple (but not simplistic) concept, and therein lies its appeal:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">[W]e call the representation of one medium in another <span class="lightEmphasis">remediation</span>, and we will argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media. What might seem at first to be an esoteric practice is so widespread that we can identify a spectrum of different ways in which digital media remediate their predecessors, a spectrum depending on the degree of perceived competition or rivalry between the new media and the old. (45)</p>
<p>This is, as Bolter and Grusin acknowledge, an insight also shared by McLuhan, who famously declared that the first content of any new medium must be a prior medium. But whereas McLuhan once divided the media sphere into “hot” and “cool” media based on the degree of participation they required (non-participatory media were, somewhat paradoxically, “hot and explosive” in McLuhan’s lexicon, while interactive media were termed “cool”), Bolter and Grusin parse various media forms against what they term the logics of immediacy and hypermediacy.</p>
<p>Immediacy denotes media that aspire to a condition of transparency by attempting to efface all traces of material artifice from the viewer’s perception. Immersive virtual reality, photo realistic computer graphics, and film (in the mainstream Hollywood paradigm) are all examples of media forms that obey the logic of immediacy - the expectation is that the viewer will forget that he or she is watching a movie or manipulating a data glove and be “drawn into” the environment or scene that is depicted for them. Hypermediated phenomena, by contrast, are fascinated by their own status as media constructs and thus call attention to their strategies of mediation and representation. Video games, television, the World-Wide Web, and most multimedia applications subscribe to the logic of hypermediacy. And, as Bolter and Grusin are quick to claim, “our two seemingly contradictory logics not only coexist in digital media today but are mutually dependent” (6). This co-dependency inaugurates what they refer to as the “double logic of remediation,” which finds expression as follows: “Each act of mediation depends on other acts of mediation. Media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other, and this process is integral to media. Media need each other in order to function as media at all” (55).</p>
<p>Once articulated, the ideas behind remediation are quickly grasped and readers may find themselves seeing (I stress <span class="lightEmphasis">seeing</span> - Bolter and Grusin’s critical orientation is overwhelmingly visual) remediations everywhere. It also becomes clear, as Bolter and Grusin themselves suggest, that remediation is the formal analogue of the marketing strategy commonly known as repurposing, whereby a Hollywood film (say) will spawn a vast array of product tie-ins, from video games to action figures to fast-food packages and clothing accessories. This practice raises a daunting set of questions for those concerned with matters of textual theory, for if we grant that a film (or an action figure) can be a text, we are then obliged to re-evaluate much of what we think we know about textual authority and textual transmission in this late age of mechanical reproduction - by what formal, material, or generic logic could we define the ontological horizon of the repurposed text known as “Star Wars?” Likewise, when one refers to “Wired,” is one speaking of just the printed newsstand version of the magazine or is one speaking of the multivalent media property that now cultivates a variety of vertically integrated distribution networks, including: an imprint for printed books about cyberculture, <span class="booktitle">HardWired</span>; an online forum and Web portal, <span class="booktitle">HotWired</span>; separate Web presences for the magazine itself as well as affiliated online ventures (which include <span class="booktitle">WiredNews</span>), <span class="booktitle">LiveWired</span>, and <span class="booktitle">Suck</span>); and two search engines, <span class="booktitle">HotBot</span> and <span class="booktitle">NewsBot</span>. That recognition of this broader media identity is central to any discussion of <span class="booktitle">Wired</span> the magazine is dramatized by the fact that as of this writing the URL <a href="http://www.wired.com" class="outbound">http://www.wired.com</a> deflects visitors from the site of the magazine proper to the aforementioned <span class="booktitle">WiredNews</span> - which only then offers a subordinate link to the Web presence for the newsstand version of <span class="booktitle">Wired</span> (which is itself of course an electronic remediation of the printed content). In retrospect, it seems odd that Bolter and Grusin do not make more of <span class="booktitle">Wired</span>, both because of the complex media ecology outlined above and because in it we have an artifact of print culture that, largely on the basis of graphic design and strong marketing, has remediated the experience of “cyberspace” so successfully that the word “wired” itself has become a popular synecdoche for the Information Age.</p>
<p>Some extended case studies of that sort (MTV would have been another natural) might have added much to the book, but instead its middle section is taken up by more generic surveys of various media forms - computer games, photo realistic graphics, film, television, virtual reality, the World Wide Web, and others - and these are a mixed lot. The chapters on computer games, graphics, television, and film are generally strong. Bolter and Grusin have an enviable feel for the subtle relationships that obtain between media forms, and they are at their best during moments such as a discussion of <span class="booktitle">Myst</span> when they argue convincingly that the game - frequently remarked upon for the “realism” of its graphics - succeeds not via the logic of immediacy, but rather by <span class="lightEmphasis">remediating</span> the immediacy of Hollywood film; they press the point home by observing that there are in fact hundreds of examples of video games adapted from mainstream films (98). Their argument about virtual reality’s lineage in film is equally suggestive: “One way to understand virtual reality, therefore, is as a remediation of the subjective style of film, an exercise in identification through offering a visual point of view… In their treatments [ <span class="booktitle">Brainstorm</span>, <span class="booktitle">Lawnmower Man</span>, <span class="booktitle">Johnny Mnemonic</span>, <span class="booktitle">Disclosure</span>, <span class="booktitle">Strange Days</span> ] Hollywood writers grasped instantly (as did William Gibson in his novel <span class="booktitle">Neuromancer</span>) that virtual reality is about the definition of the self and the relationship of the body to the world” (165-166). What is compelling here is not so much the notion that virtual reality is about “the definition of self and the relationship of the body to the world,” but rather the confidence with which Bolter and Grusin are able to identify a specific filmic technique - the subjective camera, prominent in all the titles mentioned above - and align it with the popular rhetoric surrounding virtual reality, thereby foregrounding the artificial imperatives of both media forms.</p>
<p>But at times the middle chapters also seem sparsely developed. That same chapter on virtual reality, for example, is only seven pages long (including illustrations), and it includes no discussion of any functional VR systems beyond mention of research by Georgia Tech’s Larry Hodges. Likewise, the only electronic artist to receive any individual treatment in the chapter on digital arts is Jeffrey Shaw, who is perhaps best know for an installation piece entitled <span class="booktitle">The Legible City</span>, now a decade old. At other times, elements of the historical record which it would have been desirable to have on hand are simply missing. A discussion of the video game Pong, for example, offers the tantalizing suggestion that its fundamentally graphical orientation, compared to contemporary UNIX and DOS command line interfaces, “suggested new formal and cultural purposes for digital technology” (90). Yet we are not given any specific date for Pong’s first release, or for the releases of its many subsequent versions and variations (which it would have been interesting to track across different platforms); nor do we learn who first programmed the game, or where, or why. Absences of this kind detract from the usefulness of the middle sections as basic references for students of new media.</p>
<p>Given the scope of the attempted coverage in <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> ‘s middle sections - where the topics range from Renaissance painting and animated film to telepresent computing and “mediated spaces” (e.g., Disneyland) - lapses of the kind I note above are perhaps inevitable. And indeed, very early on in the book Bolter and Grusin offer a familiar kind of disclaimer: “We cannot hope to explore the genealogy of remediation in detail. What concerns us is remediation in our current media in North America, and here we can analyze specific texts, images, and uses” (21). But this emphasis on the “specific” is itself a scholarly move that, as Alan Liu and others have demonstrated, bears with it deep implications for any critical project conducted under the broad sign of cultural criticism, a point to which I will return (below).</p>
<p>But some remaining features of the book deserve notice first: <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> is lovingly illustrated, and Bolter and Grusin deserve credit for the care with which the images were selected and reproduced. The juxtaposition of the front page of <span class="booktitle">USA Today’s</span> printed edition with the home page of <span class="booktitle">USA Today</span> on the Web (40-41) or the comparison of stills from a 1980 CNN air check with a more contemporary broadcast format from CNN in 1997 (190-191) do as much to underscore the essential rightness of the core remediation concept as any number of expository passages in the text. The first and third sections of the book also include reference pointers to relevant passages from the survey of media forms in the middle section - these are “the printed equivalent of hyperlinks” (14), and some readers may find them occasionally convenient. <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> ‘s third and final section examines logics of remediation in relation to contemporary conceptions of the self (readers who have already done their homework with Sandy Stone or Sherry Turkle may find themselves skimming these pages). The bibliography, with about 175 entries, is useful. And finally, there is the obligatory glossary; it will mark a significant milestone in the maturity of new media studies as a discipline when one can publish a book in the field without feeling the need to define for the lay-reader “virtual reality” or “MOO” (or “media,” for that matter: “Plural of medium” [274]).</p>
<p>Near the end of the book, Bolter and Grusin offer an account of the media coverage of Princess Diana’s funeral precession: “Because the funeral itself occurred for American audiences in the middle of the night, CBS decided to run a videotape of the whole ceremony later in the morning. At that same time, however, the precession was still carrying Diana’s body to its final resting place. The producers of the broadcast thus faced the problem of providing two image streams to their viewers” (269). The solution CBS adopted was to divide the screen into two separate windows, one displaying the funeral ceremony and the other the procession. Bolter and Grusin point out that this move marks a shift from the desire for immediacy and “authenticity” of experience that normally governs live TV to a logic of hypermediacy that places the emphasis on the media apparatus itself; but the more interesting point, I think, is that this particular broadcast solution was viable because CBS could count on its audience having already been exposed to bifurcated screen-spaces through the assimilation of the computer desktop and its attendant interface conventions into the cultural mainstream. Bracketing technical considerations, it seems reasonable to argue that CBS could not have opted for the two-window solution in an earlier era of television because the visual environment would have simply been too alien from their viewers’ expectations. Bolter and Grusin go on to note that, “other and perhaps better examples (both of hypermediacy and remediation) will no doubt appear, as each new event tops the previous ones in its excitement or the audacity of its claims to immediacy” (270). Had this closing chapter been written today, Bolter and Grusin would have almost certainly chosen as their example the multi-window displays that facilitated the so-called “surreal” split-screen television coverage of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings and Operation Desert Fox (the American and British air strikes on Iraq) in December of 1998.</p>
<p>That the conflicting logics of immediacy (in the desire for live “eyewitness” coverage of two major news events transpiring simultaneously) and hypermediacy (in the <a href="http://www.altx.com/ebr/reviews/rev9/r9kir/r9kir1.htm" class="outbound">spectacle</a> of video feeds from Washington and Baghdad both on the screen at the same time, each in a separate content window, the display filled out by a lurid background “wallpaper” graphic) manifested themselves so dramatically in one of the most notable media events of recent memory surely confirms the usefulness of remediation as a critical armature for contemporary media studies. But it is worth noting that Bolter and Grusin explicitly describe their technique in <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> as genealogical (“a genealogy of affiliations, not a linear history” [55]), and therefore I’d like to close this review with some additional words about genealogy, and its suitability to new media studies by contrast with other varieties of historicism.</p>
<p>Genealogy as a critical mode comes to us from Foucault; it is most closely associated with his later books such as <span class="booktitle">Discipline and Punish</span> and the three volumes of the <span class="booktitle">History of Sexuality</span>. Genealogy is distinct from Foucault’s other famous method, archeology, deployed most fully in works like <span class="booktitle">The Order of Things</span> and <span class="booktitle">The Birth of the Clinic</span>. Foucault’s most sustained articulation of genealogy is to be found in a 1971 essay entitled “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” whose opening lines are these: “Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times” (76). A few pages later, we read:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of a people. On the contrary, to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations - or conversely, the complete reversals - the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents. (81)</p>
<p>Bolter and Grusin acknowledge this same essay, and indeed quote from it in their first footnote. Yet it seems questionable how much the “genealogy” of <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> really resembles what Foucault imagined by the term. True, Bolter and Grusin’s narrative of media forms is not linear (or rather, it is not chronological), but their narrative is also “documentary” only in the most casual sense and it operates at a level of detail far removed from Foucault’s trademark archival research. Indeed, of the many books published on topics related to new media studies in recent years, none of them, it seems to me, has yet matched the level of documentary (archival) research evident in a work such as Michael A. Cusumano and David B. Yoffie’s <span class="booktitle">Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and its Battle with Microsoft</span> (1998). A typical passage from Cusumano and Yoffie (who are business professors) reads like this:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">In August 1994, the Seattle-based start-up Spry became the first company to market a commercial version of Mosaic. At least half a dozen non-NCSA-based browsers were also available or in the works. In addition to Netscape’s Navigator, competitors also included Cello, developed at Cornell; BookLink’s InterNet Works; the MCC consortium’s MacWeb; O’Reilly and Associates Viola; and Frontier Technologies’s WinTapestry. By early 1995, <span class="booktitle">PC Magazine</span> declared that 10 Web browsers were “essentially complete”[…] In April 1995, <span class="booktitle">Internet World</span> counted 24 browsers, and by the end of the year CNET had found 28 browsers worthy of review. Very few of those products had any appreciable market share. (95-96)</p>
<p>How soon we forget. Cello, WebTapestry, even Mosaic. Where are they now? Whole generations of software technologies (compressed with the week- and month-long micro-cycles of “Internet Time”) are already lost to us. But surely this level of detail - conspicuous in the InterCapped names of bygone products and technologies, punctuated by the antiquarian version numbers of specific hardware and software implementations - ought to be a key element of any historical method, genealogical or otherwise, that critics working in new media studies bring to bear.</p>
<p>Let me suggest that the start-up work of theorizing digital culture has by now largely been done, and that serious and sustained attention to archival and documentary sources is the next step for new media studies if it is to continue to mature as a field. Freidrich Kittler’s <span class="booktitle">Discourse Networks 1800/1900</span> already does some of this work. And we could also do worse than <span class="booktitle">Internet Time</span> for a summation of the pace of scholarship in new media studies to date, with fresh books (<span class="lightEmphasis">books</span>: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/home/redirect.html/002-2203603-5988855" class="outbound">the medium signifies</a>) on matters cyber, virtual, or hyper appearing almost weekly. But where in all this are the careful analyses of the white papers and technical reports (for example) that must lie behind the changing broadcast strategies Bolter and Grusin point to at CNN? Where are the interviews with the network’s executives and with their media consultants and market analysts? Rather than speculate broadly about computer graphics or theories of digital reproduction, why not perform a detailed case study of one particular data format, such as JPEG or GIF (which has a fascinating history) or a particular software implementation such as QuickTime, which has been enormously influential to multimedia development as it has evolved through multiple versions and generations? Certainly there are practical constraints that might mitigate against such projects: would Apple unlock its technical reports and developers’ notes on QuickTime for a scholar writing a book? It is hard to know, but: Netscape did it for Cusumano and Yoffie.</p>
<p>A few more thoughts in this vein. Compared to other scholarly fields, new media studies has thus far operated within relatively limited horizons of historicism. Historical perspective in books on digital culture generally takes one of two forms: it is either broadly comparative or it is transparently narrative. Bolter’s earlier book, <span class="booktitle">Writing Space</span>, is a classic example of the former mode, contextualizing hypertext (very usefully) within a much longer history of writing. Sandy Stone’s pages describing the final days of the Atari Lab in <span class="booktitle">The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age</span> is an example of the latter narrative mode, as is the writing in such pop-history books as Simon and Schuster’s <span class="booktitle">Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet</span>. But both the comparative and the narrative modes encourage a relatively casual kind of historiographic writing. N. Katherine Hayles’ just-published <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics</span>, which I am reading now, is perhaps the beginning of something new, offering a more rigorous kind of historical inquiry. <a href="/criticalecologies/machinic" class="internal">thREAD to the Linda Brigham’s review of Hayles</a> But Hayles still does not approach the level of self-reflexivity evident in a work like James Chandler’s <span class="booktitle">England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism</span>, published last year by Chicago, in which Chandler historicizes history itself as a peculiarly Romantic category of knowledge, while simultaneously undertaking a meticulous investigation of the events of a single pivotal year in the development of British Romanticism. A brief passage from the preface, to suggest the flavor of the volume:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Within part 1, the first section, “Writing Historicism, Then and Now,” tries to establish a way of talking about “dated-specificity” in literary-cultural studies that makes patent the repetition between the “spirit of the age” discourse of British Romanticism and the contemporary discourse of the “return to history” in the Anglo-American Academy. The second section…moves from the notion of historical culture implicit in that “dated specificity” to consider the representation practices that such a notion of culture presupposes or demands… Then, having established how one might understand England in 1819 as a historical case, its literature as a historicizing casuistry, I turn…to explicate a series of works, all produced or consumed in that year, as cases in respect to that larger frame of reference. (xvi-xvii)</p>
<p>Chandler is ultimately ambivalent about the academy’s current insistence on “dated specificity” (including the sort I have been calling for above), as is his fellow-Romanticist <a href="http://vos.ucsb.edu/index.asp" class="outbound">Alan Liu</a> in “Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail,” a seminal essay which ought to be required reading for anyone working in a field of cultural study, including media studies. Liu makes the telling point that recent critical-historical modes, from Foucauldian genealogy to cultural anthropology and the literary New Historicism, all thrive on an unexamined rhetoric that consecrates what he terms the “virtuosity of the detail” (80), a rhetoric which Liu is then able to convincingly align with the most familiar tenets of Romantic “local” transcendence, such that: “insignificance becomes the trope of transcendent meaning” (93).</p>
<p>Liu’s critique is too complex and finely-developed to go into here any further, but it underscores a fundamental crisis in new media studies today: the field, having really flourished only since the early nineties, has on the one hand not yet had occassion to undertake the kind of detailed case histories I advocate above; yet case studies (their “dated specificity”) are, on the other hand, already themselves being historicized as of a particular institutional moment. There is, for example, something to be learned from the curious genealogy of the font family known - fateful name - as Localizer (see <a href="http://www.fontfont.de/packages/locali10461/locali10461.html" class="outbound">FontFont</a>). Released in 1996, the Localizer font mimics late-seventies LCD technology in an era when state-of-the-art digital typesetting permits perfect anti-aliasing. (Localizer is of course a classic remediation. Its design notes read in part: “we thought this would be the future, then it wasn’t, but it didn’t matter after all, so here it is.”) Layers and layers of media history are perhaps held in delicate high-res suspension among such exteriorities of accidents. Yet at present, new media studies apparently lacks the deep historical self-reflexivity necessary to undertake a genealogy of the Localizer font that would not also appear naive in the face of a critique such as Liu’s.</p>
<p>All of this is not to be taken as a criticism of <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> itself, for Bolter and Grusin would surely (and fairly) object that a book engaging the particular issues I have been raising here was simply not the book they set out to write. Nonetheless, the probable success of a book such as <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> only intensifies the realization that new media studies now faces disciplinary challenges that go far beyond building a critical vocabulary and syntax. I will go on record as saying that in order for new media studies to move beyond its current 1.0 generation of scholarly discourse - a discourse which is still largely, though not exclusively, descriptive and explanatory (all those glossaries!) - the field must make a broad-based commitment to serious archival research. Of course the archive is more likely to be found at venues such as Xerox PARC or IBM or Microsoft or Apple - or in a Palo Alto garage - than at the library and rare book room. But case studies of specific hardware and software implementations, and of the micro-events in the commercial and institutional environments in which those implementations are developed and deployed are absolutely essential if we are to begin achieving deeper understandings of the impact of new media on the culture at large. (An example of one such “micro-event”: March 31, 1998. Netscape Communications Corporation posts the source code for its 5.0 generation of browsers on its public Web site in an attempt to recapture market-share from Microsoft. This, I submit, is the real stuff of which new media history is being made.) Those case studies can - should - be theoretically informed, building on the groundwork of a book such as <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span>.</p>
<p>There is no task more important for new media studies than demystifing the unequivocally material processes of development now at work in the high-tech industry. Doing that work, and doing it right, will take time - archive time, not Internet Time.</p>
<p>&gt;&gt;—&gt; <a href="/criticalecologies/Adornian" class="internal">Jan Baetens responds</a>.</p>
<p>——————————————————————</p>
<h2>works cited</h2>
<p>Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. <span class="booktitle">Remediation: Understanding New Media</span>. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. [Note: All citations in this review are from a pre-press review copy of <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span>, provided by the MIT Press.]</p>
<p>Chandler, James. <span class="booktitle">England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism</span>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.</p>
<p>Cusumano, Michael A. and David B. Yoffie. <span class="booktitle">Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscapes and Its Battle with Microsoft</span>. New York: The Free Press, 1998.</p>
<p>Foucault, Michel. ” Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” <span class="booktitle">The Foucault Reader</span>. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 76-100.</p>
<p>Hafner, Katie and Matthew Lyon. <span class="booktitle">Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet</span>. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.</p>
<p>Hayles, N. Katherine. <span class="booktitle">How We Became Post-Human: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics</span>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.</p>
<p>Kittler, Freidrich. <span class="booktitle">Discourse Networks 1800/1900</span>. Trans. Michael Metteer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.</p>
<p>Liu, Alan. “Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail.” <span class="booktitle">Representation 32</span> (Fall 1990): 75-113.</p>
<p>McLuhan, H. Marshall. <span class="booktitle">Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man</span>. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964, 1994.</p>
<p>Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. <span class="booktitle">The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age</span>. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/bolter">bolter</a>, <a href="/tags/grusin">grusin</a>, <a href="/tags/kittler">kittler</a>, <a href="/tags/mcluhan">mcluhan</a>, <a href="/tags/media">media</a>, <a href="/tags/communication">communication</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/beaudin">beaudin</a>, <a href="/tags/foucault">foucault</a>, <a href="/tags/hayles">hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/chandler">chandler</a>, <a href="/tags/microsoft">microsoft</a>, <a href="/tags/internet">internet</a>, <a href="/tags/kirschenbaum">kirschenbaum</a>, <a href="/tags/matthew-kirschenbaum">matthew kirschenbaum</a>, <a href="/tags/matt-kirschenbaum">matt kirschenbaum</a>, <a href="/tags/world-wide-web">world-wide web</a>, <a href="/tags/world-wide-web-0">world wide web</a>, <a href="/tags/cusmano">cusmano</a>, <a href="/tags/yoffie">yoffie</a>, <a href="/tags/jeffrey-shaw">jeffrey shaw</a>, <a href="/tags/legible-city">legible city</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator729 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/archival#commentsDo Androids Dream of Electric Mothers?http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/liminal
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Linda C Brigham</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2006-11-29</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><span class="booktitle">My Mother Was A Computer</span> seems to me to be one of those liminal books, poised between multiple basins of attraction. It could have gone, not just either way, but in any of several different ways, were the slightest breeze to blow. Hayles, in her continued vigilance against technologically inspired monisms, has produced not only a critical book, but a riven, multifocal book, far from equilibrium - and, I think, consciously so.</p>
<p>The book title is a case in point. It alludes to a diachronic pun. Hayles’ mother was a computer in accord with earlier twentieth-century usage, a repetitive manipulator of numbers, an activity rendered obsolete by technological advances in software and hardware. But the resonance of the title now, in the current age of the digital convergence with genetic engineering, is more ontological and more organic - and eerily possible. A genetically designed child could presumably do homage to something silicon-based on Mother’s Day. The message: computers are not only our tools, prosthetics for calculation and memory; they’ve also become part of our imaginary horizon. In Hayles’ words, we now inhabit a “regime of computation” in which the computer is undecidably “both means and metaphor” (20). Computation is everywhere, both on our desks and in our dreams. And so it’s appropriate that her own work follow them to lots of places: into literary criticism, new technologies, cultural studies, and personal meditation - and do so at a historical juncture when it is difficult to predict what kind of thing will go in what direction.</p>
<p>We would, perhaps, like to believe that digital convergence - the apparently limitless domain of that which can be transformed into units digestible by computers - will give us freedoms whose instantiation had hitherto been only imaginary. The book begins and ends (and there is a middle layer which I’ll discuss below) with forays into various mixed results of this scenario by perusing the fictions of Henry James, Phillip K. Dick, James Tiptree Jr., Stanislaw Lem, and Greg Egan. Hayles examines these fictions in the context of contemporary cybernetic claims to metaphysics - primarily Stephen Wolfram’s claim that we can ground all complexity in the simplicity of cellular automata. Fictional scenarios suggest that even if the math is right, the application is wrong; humans do things with whatever stuff with whatever affordances weirdly, in ways that continuously puncture the cybernetic envelope. Hayles reminds us at dramatic moments in her book that human experience is profoundly analog, that natural language, for example, <span class="lightemphasis">isn’t</span> just a High-Level-Language. We need to regard the imbrication of our present and future in the schemes and tropes of digital devices precisely <span class="lightemphasis">as</span> figures, as cases of what she called “intermediation” - a many-stranded weave of organisms, machines, subjects, economies, and representations that produce both convergences with and divergences from technologies.</p>
<p>I must confess, though, that I flag under the burden of all this junk. I need a little less complexity, a through-line in the narrative. It may be there and I have missed it. Still, at the risk of betraying a sophistication deficit, I’m going to suggest that such a line is either missing or elusive. The book’s beginning (the section “Making”) and end (entitled “Transmitting”) sandwich a middle section (“Storing”) that <span class="lightemphasis">seems</span> to have the ingredients of a more unified exposition. Here Hayles discusses Shelley Jackson’s fiction, <span class="booktitle">Patchwork Girl</span> in the context of the historical development of copyright law. Jackson’s <span class="booktitle">Patchwork Girl</span> is a reworking, or perhaps a collaborative twin, of Mary Shelley’s <span class="booktitle">Frankenstein</span>, and as such illustrates and enacts the inherent multiplicity of authorship. Hayles brings out its concomitant critique of authorship as a fiction created by the institution of copyright, a device used to channel cultural and capital revenues to an individual regardless of how many amanuenses, muses, spiritual guides, cooks or chambermaids sustain that individual and participate or even collaborate in that individual’s “work.” In this same section, Hayles presents a fascinating account of Neal Stephenson’s <span class="booktitle">Cryptonomicon</span>, written while the author converted from Microsoft to Linux. Stephenson saw the beastly fiction of his position as supposed “user” of a proprietary software with ambitions towards world domination. He recognized himself not only as the hapless consumer of an expensive, controlled good, but as a participant in an aggregate of such consumers whose net effect is technological addiction and abject dependency on a mass scale.</p>
<p>I would like to see the relationship between these two chapters more firmly developed. Copyright and word processing software both control capital flows, but they do so by different means that represent evolved dependencies. Copyright animates the fantasy of the liberal, unified subject (as Hayles discusses so lucidly) which colonizes its network of support - memory systems, family systems, and other systems upon which it is materially dependent. This organization follows a familiar nineteenth-century model of domination. Microsoft, though, works not through the effacement of structure but through the diversion of attention to kinds of agency we’re already conditioned by, liberal agency. The very support structures obscured by copyright now flourish on the global capital scene with little disguise, but nonetheless beyond access. We do not (despite much critical work exhorting us to do so) think in terms of the medium underlying the natural-language text, of the digital nature of contemporary texts, which wage war for dominance over other formulas for digital representation. We’re just civilian bystanders in that war. But as such, we’re also part of the weapon of that war: the network of users. It is important to recognize that participation in a network is very seldom a means of increasing one’s agency. Feedback to network nodes seldom indicates the nature of the network; <span class="lightemphasis">that</span> information yields only to a higher level of surveillance and analysis, while the nature of the network feeds some entity beyond us, we continue to subsist on the empty calories of ideas and concepts. Concepts and ideas, the contents texts “convey,” are the opiate of the user/consumer, whose self-image as a liberal subject is just another concept - while winning and losing takes place among the machines and their producers - at the network level.</p>
<p>Perhaps I’m being crude here. But this is also my point: complexity, even organized complexity, is too vague and general to help us get a purchase on where we are and where we’re going. There are just too many variables in the massively recurcursive and many-noded feedback loops that provide the context for Hayles’ book. Yet scientists of complexity do provide more than complexity. They study networks and network types, the transformation of noise into chaos; they trace the emergence of story from random bits of narrative, and so forth, all to produce a form - unstable, fluctuating, evolving, but still, with graspable, tendencies. The model posed by cellular automata is only one case of decomplexification, perhaps only the most obnoxious. Others might have been selected. Hayles complains that theorists making claims about complexity and emergence have not yet shown how order arises from its less conceptually palatable components one level down. But she does not mention here, although she does elsewhere, the work of many theorists who aim to do precisely that: Hermann Haken and Scott Kelso in physics, for example, or Esther Thelen and Linda Smith in developmental psychobiology, or Walter J. Freeman, even Antonio Damasio in neurology.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, Hayles’ work is admirable in its open-ended, open-minded engagement of a continuously changing intellectual and artistic field. She focuses her last chapter on the fiction of Greg Egan, not because he secures her criticisms of the Regime of Computation, but because he destabilizes them. Egan creates worlds where digital convergence with the organic basis of the self has rendered death obsolete - and in that way, he represents the Regime of Computation’s most seductive fantasy. As one might expect, though, the end of death is not as utopian an event as it appears from the standpoint of mortality. However, what’s compelling about Egan’s fiction is <span class="lightemphasis">not</span> what it says about the quality of life or death in their usual analog contexts, but how the digital interface with life and death alters self-perception. Life and death ordinarily comprise our most generalized binary, our horizon of being. It seems impossible to put either under qualification. But Egan does; one’s life can become a selection from a class of consumer goods. His technological fiction in effect elicits a nuanced phenomenology of a range of conscious states. Compared to this, claims Hayles, Slavoj Zizek’s account of the position of death in psychoanalytic theory, as the final destination, is positively “parochial.” Perhaps emancipation from psychoanalysis, and its purported isomorph, culture, is not only a cybernetic delusion. Perhaps it is a side effect. Hayles’ sensitivity to side effects like Egan is a trait worth emulating (or simulating?)</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/electronic-literature">electronic literature</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/posthuman">posthuman</a>, <a href="/tags/hayles">hayles</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1161 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/liminal#commentsThe Database, the Interface, and the Hypertext: A Reading of Strickland's Vhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/isomorphic
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Jaishree Odin</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2007-10-14</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The uniqueness of a new-media work is the mobility of its elements, present as binary code in computer, yet capable of being mobilized into action through user interaction or through programming. Many new media works make full use of multiple functionalities of current software applications, bringing to light in unique ways the effect a well-designed interface can have on the meaning-making process. How do we read these digital texts that mutate with the touch of a key? What is the role of the medium in the meaning-making process? Though I explore these questions, I also attempt to go beyond them to see if new media works can serve as a lens to reflect on the postmodern condition. Strickland’s <span class="booktitle">V: Losing L’una/WaveSon.nets/Vniverse</span> (2003), with a dual existence in print and the electronic medium, is especially useful for this exploration. It is self-reflexive as it comments on both reading and writing practices. It also lies at the intersection of multiple discourses of science, technology, philosophy, literature and art. V is thus ideal for exploring not only how media specificity contributes to the reading experience, but also what the paradigm shift from modernity to postmodernity implies about reading, writing and living.</p>
<p>Lev Manovich (2001) in a perceptive analysis of new media works makes a distinction between database and narrative. Historically speaking, narrative has been associated with the novel and the film. With the advent of the new media, a new category of narrative has come into existence that is intricately linked to the database - a collection of items that constitutes the content of the work and exists as binary code in computer. Unlike the print medium where content is the same as the interface, the database produced by the writer for the digital medium needs an interface to make it accessible to the user. For the first time we have a distinction between the content of the work and the interface to access it. In fact the same content now can be accessed in multiple ways.</p>
<p>In this respect hypermedia literature can be compared to collage or montage (Landow 1999). Unlike the flat surface of traditional collage, however, the digital representational space is dynamic in nature. A traditional collage, including assemblage and montage, is created through combining materials from different sources which exist in fixed relation to one another whether spatially or temporally. Earlier scholars regarded collage as the best representation of modernist aspirations to achieve aesthetic immediacy, <cite class="note" id="note_1">Cubist collage has been seen in terms of experimentation with the frame. Broken frames, no frames, or frames absorbed partially or completely in the field of representation, Karsten Harries writes, represent a prelude to a turn away from the mimetic function of art as it brings the viewer’s attention to the work’s autonomy. Harries links the use of broken frame to the broader state of postmodern culture where people have lost faith in metanarratives and sees the broken frame symbolizing the condition characterized by the absence of any metaphysical ordering of the world. A postmodern interpretation, however, shift the focus from any search for ground to exploring the process of coming into being of the world or artwork.</cite> but in recent postmodern reinterpretations by art historians have described cubist collage as a reaction to the modernist desire for aesthetic immediacy in that such works, in fact, create multiple fields of reality that exist in dynamic interrelations with one another in a unified representational space. <cite class="note" id="note_2">Brockelman comments on the two antithetical views of collage; collage aspiring to ‘presence’ or ‘aesthetic immediacy’ and collage as antirepresentational nature. It is precisely this ambiguous nature of collage, this oscillation between two opposite meaning contexts that makes it ideal for studying the postmodern condition. In a collage, “sense is something to be made rather than secured…[it] both insists that we learn to live without guarantees of meaning (the reality of ‘knowing our place’) and opens the possibility for a kind of meaningfulness that we ourselves produce though a process of judgment.” (Brockelman 2000: 37).</cite></p>
<p>Reading digital collage is vastly different from that of reading/viewing traditional collage. It is capable of functionalities and user interactivity, which have dramatic implications for both the writer and the reader. Software applications make it possible to create a work with text, sound, animation, or image, each of which can be programmed to appear onscreen in a variety of ways. The user interaction is thus only one of the ways shaping the screen display. Not only are the reader’s eyes and hands engaged in a playful interaction with the text, but also the work itself can acquire a certain degree of intentionality. The individual textual units can materialize on screen and in turn become the surface to access other textual units in a hypertextual collage, which can be entered from any point.</p>
<p>In a print text like Mark Z. Danielewski’s <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span> (2000) where a high level of collage effect is achieved through skillfully using footnotes, letters, stories, stories within stories, different fonts, blank pages, upside down pages, it is still possible to get an overview of the whole work, at least visually. In an electronic text, on the other hand, no such visual mastery is possible as the electronic narrative unfolds in time like film, even as it is different from film in that the database cannot be seen, but only accessed. In the digital work, Manovich writes, the database is permanent and real whereas narrative is virtual as readers can trace their own path through the narrative. In film, on the other hand, narrative is real and the database is virtual in that film is the final product of the film crew’s work with the database of possible shots and scenes. What was in the background in film is foregrounded in new media works and accordingly, the reader/user experience is transformed too as hypertext reading can be seen as multiple reading possibilities through the database of the work.</p>
<p>In electronic literature or art works, thus, a second layer on top of the content has to be created in the form of the interface. The linkages and their organization can determine what is visually presented on the screen when the user acts on the text. The database logic that governs new media works introduces a whole set of new possibilities of conceiving a work. The interface can be programmed in ways that the assembling/disassembling of the semantic and graphic elements can take place in a variety of ways. The database elements can be broken into smallest meaning-making components and programmed to assemble into larger or smaller semantic units through reader interactivity with the text. The graphic design of the interface can add further nuances of meaning to the unfolding text. In the hypertext environment, the visual dimension of seeing the text becomes as important as reading it.</p>
<p>In the early hypertexts, the verbal textual segments and the links joining them constituted a major aspect of the writer’s artistic strategy to create a hypertext. <cite class="note" id="note_3">The early hypertext theorists (George Landow, Michael Joyce, Jay Bolter, and others) accordingly focused primarily on the linked structure of the electronic text. That could partially be attributed to the limitations of the electronic medium during that period which allowed easy access to the functionality more geared toward manipulation of verbal text through programs like Storyspace and Hypercard. In last decade or so, new commercial software applications and authoring programs have made it possible to include image, sound, and animation in the electronic text.</cite> As electronic literature has become more sophisticated, the exclusive attention to the written chunks of text and linking have been seen by some recent critics as very limiting since this leaves out the medium’s contribution to the reading experience. <cite class="note" id="note_4">The transparency of print surface was maintained through the development of writing conventions that minimized its presence as a medium (Lanham (1993). Since print medium has promoted the convention of a transparent interface, the role of the medium in shaping reading experience has not been taken into account in literary criticism. The artists’ books of the nineteen sixties and seventies which draw the reader’s attention to the materiality of the book occupied the periphery of literary production and did not have any substantial impact on how theorists and critics perceived the role of the medium on the unfolding or exploring of a particular literary work (Hayles 2002).</cite> In new media works, no longer do the reader’s actions alone determine the course of the narrative. The interface design can contribute to the meaning-making process, too, as the medium itself acquires some sort of intentionality. Onscreen displays can be made reversible or irreversible through programming as the reader interacts with the text.</p>
<p>Various components of electronic narratives, for example, database of content, the material interface, and the mouse-overs or the keyboard clicks of the reader destabilize the earlier one-to-one relationship that the reader had with the print text while at the same time bringing to the forefront the materiality of the medium. To what the media makes possible with respect to accessing the text is added another dimension of the role media itself in the meaning-making process.</p>
<p>The complexity of the material medium which contains as well as ‘performs’ the text has a great impact on how the text unfolds as well as how the reader explores and experiences such a text. The strategic release of verbal, graphic or sometimes even audio content is an important part of the artistic strategy in a variety of new media works, including hypertexts with highly visual and multi-media interfaces. Some new media writers/artists focus on the verbal text as the centerpiece with the links constituting an important aspect of accessing the database, for example, M. D. Coverley’s (aka Marjorie Luesebrink) <span class="booktitle">Califia</span> (2001). Coverley makes an extensive use of multi-media content to create an interface that is as much a guide as a means to access the database of diverse elements. The multiple layering in <span class="booktitle">Califia</span> is achieved through the mixing of music, artwork, fiction, history, myths and legends as well as photographs and maps that add a rich texture to the text which the reader can explore in multiple ways. Similarly, Caitlin Fisher’s <span class="booktitle">These Waves of Girls</span>, an associative hypertext, is a web of memories created through linked chunks of text with images. Talan Memmott’s <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> approaches the whole question of web-based writing from a totally different perspective as he meditates on the coming into being of words and sentences as codework that reflect a coalescence of theory and fiction. The unfolding of text engages the reader visually. Jackson commenting on this text writes: “Mmmott borrows as much from the conventions of html code as from the not much less difficult codes of Deleuzian theory, metamorphosing them into a jammed, fractured diction full of slashes, dots and brackets. There is a purpose to this besides play, since the piece is about the code-mediated relationship between the reader, the (electronic) text, and the author” (Jackson 2001).</p>
<h2>Strickland’s <span class="booktitle">V: Losing L’una/WaveSon.nets/Vniverse</span></h2>
<p>In <span class="booktitle">Writing Machine</span> (2002), Katherine Hayles proposes ‘Media Specific Analysis’ as an aid to read new media works. Kaye, Hayles’ fictional persona in this work, calls all texts ‘technotexts’ that interact with their own materiality and possess three characteristics: chunked text, links, and multiple reading paths. The materiality of technotexts cannot be specified in advance as it is an emergent property and comes into existence through the interactions between the physical properties of a work and its artistic strategies. Such texts give physical form to both content and artistic strategies which the user sets into motion through her interaction with the interface. In other words, “materiality depends on how the work mobilizes its resources as a physical artifact as well as on the user’s interactions with the work and the interpretive strategies she develops - strategies that include physical manipulations as well as conceptual frameworks” (Hayles 2002: 33). In the electronic text the medium thus becomes an important part of the reading experience, as it can be used by the writer/artist in creative ways to reflect on the meaning-making process or contribute to the meaning(s).</p>
<p>Hayles’ Media-Specific Analysis can be used as a heuristic tool to see how a rhetorical form, for example print text, is transformed when it is instantiated in the electronic media. If a print text is transported from the print medium to the electronic medium, the changed environment, in which the verbal text materializes, impacts the meaning making process. A text that lends itself to such an analysis is Stephanie Strickland’s <span class="booktitle">V</span> (2002) a collection of poems with dual existence, in print as well as electronic medium. In the print medium, <span class="booktitle">V</span> is an invertible print book with two beginnings: <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span> and <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span>, both pointing to the middle of the book that refers the reader to the web-based section called <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span>. It is as if the print book is cleaved into two halves and out of it emerges the electronic version of <span class="booktitle">V</span>.</p>
<p>In that <span class="booktitle">V</span> has dual existence, it allows the reader to become aware of how medium specific possibilities and constraints shape a text. Strickland has not simply transported the contents of <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span> into the electronic medium, but she, in collaboration with Cynthia Lawson, has totally reconceived the material of the print text in creating the electronic <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span>. The <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span> of <span class="booktitle">V</span> can be seen as the external database of <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span>, but the latter is a work in its own right which means that database cannot be equated with a new media work - <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> is <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span> and much more. The artistic strategies as reflected in the design of the interface have added interpretive layers to the work that do not exist in the print <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span>. It shows that the visualization of the navigational space of a new media work is as important as the creation of the database of verbal and graphic materials.</p>
<h2><span class="booktitle">V</span>: The Print Text</h2>
<p>Each side of print <span class="booktitle">V</span> could actually serve as the front of the book, though the publisher has arbitrarily chosen <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span> as the back by using it to provide the publishing information. <cite class="note" id="note_5">In a private communication, Strickland notes that the publishing material was meant to be printed on a shrink wrapper, but Penguin doesn’t use shrinkwrapping of its books.</cite> After the reader goes through one part, s/he must invert the book physically to start the second part. By making the reader handle the book in specific ways to proceed with the reading, Strickland brings the materiality of the print book to the forefront. Another strategy used to bring the reader’s attention to the medium is by breaking the continuous print text into smaller textual units. In <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span>, the poems are divided into triplets by creating number headings and subheadings, which serve the purpose of breaking the linear flow of the individually titled poems, while at the same time, by differential numbering, connecting many of those poems while isolating others. In <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span>, one long continuous poem is broken into forty-seven numbered parts, even though the text of most of the sonnets runs into the one following.</p>
<p>Through the strategic use of numbering, the poet seems to suggest to the reader not to take the linear presentation of the print medium for granted. The broken poetic units can be read in a different order or a different sequence. In a poem called “Errand Upon which we Came,” the poet gently coaxes the reader to begin anywhere and skip anything because the text is designed for that purpose. A linear way to read the book is not a better reading than the one that involves taking detours. The poet compares the reader who follows a meandering path to a leaping frog who does not know which elements he belongs to as he follows the arc of his flight. The reader is thus advised to not get stuck into linear progression of the poem, but take chances and hop from one to another. The edifice on which the work stands includes not only the artistic strategies used to create the work but also the imaginative universe to which the configuration of textual elements allude. So in the poem, the roots or the language or words on which the work stands are not the object of recovery, but the indefinable and ungraspable seen in terms of relationships as the reader is asked to dig up the roots to see what lies beyond.</p>
<p>The overall structure of the work is guided by the metaphor of coding both at the structural and thematic level. A literary work can be seen as a code pointing towards a predetermined reality where there is a one to one relationship between the words and what they signify, or the coded words can be regarded as generative in nature in that simple words or expressions can appear in complex variations leading to different hierarchies of meaning. If <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span> is regarded as 0 of the binary pair 01, then <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span> is 1. <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span> is losing the one, or in other words, it could mean return to nothingness or to the zero state - dissolution or disappearance. Thematically, <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span> refers to various strategies of reading and seeing, whereas <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span>, as one large wave of sonnets spread over 47 pages of the print book, focuses on multiple discourses that shape experience. Whereas <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span> mourns the loss of Simone Weil, metaphorically represented by the disappearance of the moon as the dawn approaches, <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span> celebrates the rebirth of the poet who now has become one with her muse.</p>
<h2><span class="booktitle">Vniverse: The Electronic Text</span></h2>
<p>The title page on both the front/back or back/front of the print book includes its mirror image in the dark “wedge of the sky”, suggesting that the contents of each part are reflected structurally or thematically in the electronic <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> of dark sky and bright stars. It seems <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span> is structurally isomorphic with the electronic <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> to the extent the print medium would allow it, whereas <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span> is thematically isomorphic with it in that the print Son.nets of this section appear in different mutations in the electronic <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span>.</p>
<p>Whether it is a reflection or not, or whether it is isomorphic or not, the web-based <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> can be regarded as a work in its own right, though a richer reading could result if the print components are read alongside the electronic component. If the print version is seen as an external database for the electronic version, it is an excellent way to see how the text mutates with the change of the medium. In the electronic medium the <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span> are transformed, both in how they unfold and how the navigational process impacts the meaning-making process. The unfolding of sonnets in <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> is dynamic as it depends on variety of factors, including how the reader interacts with the electronic database of sonnets and how the computer responds to that interaction. This is not a one-way interaction since there are some facets of the unfolding sonnets that are not under the reader’s control.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> can be seen as a meditation on the relation between computer processes, user interaction and the sonnets. The reader is invited to enter the universe of <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> and her interaction with the stars and star diagrams of the interface releases complete sonnets or sonnet fragments. The release of the sonnets is intricately linked to the diagrams of star constellations that appear and disappear by the user interaction. Navigational space in <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> is not just a transparent window to access the work but becomes an integral part of its signifying practices. In the exploratory navigational space of the interface, the machine processes, reader actions, verbal content and artistic strategies used in the work construct reader’s subjectivity. Since hypertext involves reader’s active encounter with the text, the reader becomes an integral part of the topological space created by the interaction s/he has with the electronic text. In fact, hypertext reading experience can be regarded as a sort of body writing - the path the reader traces marks the materialization of the text as well as the reader’s nomadic subjectivity.</p>
<p>Perhaps, here again we can refer back to what the poet has to say about navigation in electronic environments. In <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span>, a quoted passage comments on how shift to computerized navigational techniques has changed the aviator’s relationship to the skies. In this shift, the direct relationship to the universe has been lost. The same is true in the case of electronic sonnets of <span class="booktitle">V</span> where the reader’s direct experience of the database of semiotic signifiers is mediated by the interface that displays the text after it goes through a series of translations from machine code to digital code to natural language displayed on screen. The appearance and disappearance of diagrams of star constellations, an integral part of accessing the electronic text, add other interpretive layers. One wonders if the dual existence of sonnets in print as well as electronic space reflects the poet’s need to retain the direct experience of the text for the reader, even as she uses the electronic media and its varied navigational functionalities as well as design possibilities to re-imagine these sonnets.</p>
<p>In an essay on the creation of <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span>, Strickland compares the reader to the nomadic travelers of the ice ages whose movements on the ground were guided by the patterns of stars in the sky they invented. (Strickland and Lawson “Making the Vniverse”). In creating the interface of dark sky with stars and accompanying diagrams of star constellations, the work evokes the ancient practice of using star patterns in the night skies to help people navigate the oceans or serve as guide to plant and harvest crops. The patterns or shapes that people saw when they grouped stars in the night skies varied from culture to culture as did the stories or myths that accompanied these constellations. The constellations and stories were thus symbolic in nature and reflected the world of which they were a part. For today’s sedentary reader glued to the computer screen, Strickland produces an electronic sky with constellations or diagrams as the guide to the meaning making process. Various invented star constellations that appear in <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> are: Swimmer, Kokopelli, Broom, Twins, Bull, Fetus, Dragon Fly, Infinity, Goose, and Dipper. The star constellations appear and disappear as the reader moves the cursor across the screen. The diagrams can be stabilized by double clicking on any of the stars along the path of the constellation. A set of keywords is associated with each constellation, which serves as clue to the thematic content of a particular constellation. The diagrams give some sort of fixity to the release of sonnets grouped under each constellation. However, in spite of this fixity, there is a movement involved in the released fragmented or complete sonnets through reader’s mouse-overs or keyboard clicks. The readers are challenged to create their own sonnets out of the sonnet materials that appear and disappear as they interact with the text.</p>
<p>The star diagrams serve as a navigational aid and serve as the electronic version of the table of contents for <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span> that is missing in the print version. Here we see the electronic form in dialogue with the print form.</p>
<p>The <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> sonnets are the sonnets included under <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span> of the print book, but divided into 232 triplets in the electronic space and programmed to be released through reader interaction either as triplets or as complete sonnets. The number of times the stars are clicked determines the version of sonnet that is released - individual triplets along the constellation path, complete print-version sonnet, or complete triplet-version sonnet. The triplets can also be released by typing the sonnet number in the dial on the right hand top corner of the screen. Interestingly, the numbering of the triplets is different from the numbering of the print sonnets, with the result, if the reader types 45 in the dial, the triplet that is displayed onscreen is not the triplet from Sonnet 45, but rather from Sonnet 9 in the print version. This is because the electronic sonnets are divided into 232 triplet units whereas the fifteen-line print sonnets are only 47 in number.</p>
<p>Even the way the complete sonnet is released is interesting, in that one of the triplets associated with it appears in color as other parts of the same sonnet are slowly released. The title of the sonnet, an important semantic indicator in the print version, appears toward the end in this display. In the electronic space of <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span>, therefore, the triplet in color serves the function of the title of the completely released sonnet and becomes semantically important. The electronic version thus undermines both the sequentiality as well as the top to down reading practices of the print sonnet.</p>
<p>If <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span> (print text) triplets are compared to <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> triplets, once again there is a great difference in how they can be accessed or experienced in either medium. In <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span>, the reading is time-based in that each reading is unique and dependent on a variety of interlinked factors as the reader interacts with the text. Even though the release of triplets associated with each constellation is fixed, how the reader interacts with each star diagram determines the sequence of the release of either triplets or sonnets, so many new versions of sonnets can be formed. <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> thus foregrounds the materiality of the medium as it adds to the meaning making process. In the print version, even though the linearity of the print sonnets is broken through numbering, the reader tends to read across the numbered division to maintain the linear flow of the sonnet. The difference in how triplets appear in print and electronic version shows that electronic space is infinitely flexible and mutable both from the writer’s and the reader’s perspective. The electronic media has its own specificity which is very different from the print media.</p>
<h2>Reading <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> with its External Print Database</h2>
<p><span class="booktitle">V</span> in its entirety is a work not only about how to read but also how to see, in the literal sense of seeing the poem as it unfolds before the reader’s eyes in the electronic starlit sky and also reading it by spelling out the words as the triplets are released a letter at a time. The work is also about what lies beyond this act of reading/seeing as it points to the imaginative universe that is reflected in the navigational space of the work. In <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span>, the poet refers to any discourse as a ‘fabricated lens’ to see the world, but if this lens is imaginatively handled, the language constituting each discourse is itself seen as a lens which reflects a world of its own.</p>
<p>How does the poet conceive of the reader of <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span>? The reader is not just to notice the existence of different discourses or images and record them diligently, but the reader needs to quiet the mind and look beyond the stars of <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> to grasp ‘the profound correlation’ between the concrete and the abstract or “become part of the conversation that physical truths enter into with numbers…musical numbers, scores, patterns, algorithms.” To see is not simply to grasp the material reality of a particular object or occurrence as it appears in isolation, but it is to grasp the whole context, the web of relations, in which it materializes, and to go beyond that to experience the primordial rhythm or force which permeates it.</p>
<p class="poem" align="left">1.29</p>
<p class="poem" align="left">
a hand-mind that reaches for<br />
its breast, a mouth not<br />
held back,</p>
<p class="poem">1.30</p>
<p class="poem">
by pattern upon pattern giving way to deeper<br />
grasp giving in to rhythm or<br />
vibration or milk. (<span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span> 7)</p>
<p>In order to grasp the relationships, the reader needs to develop strategies of seeing which involve not encountering the object of study head on, but looking at it sideways, so that the fringes or the edges are the focus of attention - the edges where one discourse merges into another. Thus, the poet says:</p>
<p class="poem">1.13</p>
<p class="poem">
Advice<br />
from an astronomer: avert<br />
your eyes, look away</p>
<p class="poem">1.14</p>
<p class="poem">
to see better,<br />
to avoid,<br />
the blind spot hidden deep…</p>
<p class="poem">
in order “to enhance/ your ability/ to see near threshold of what can”</p>
<p class="poem">1.17</p>
<p class="poem">
be seen. For something right<br />
on the edge, try the blink method: first look away<br />
from, then, directly at. What</p>
<p class="poem">1.18</p>
<p class="poem">
appears, when you turn aside, disappears<br />
when you look back. (<span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span> 3-4)</p>
<p>Thus, seeing is not mastering the object of one’s gaze in order to fit it in a pre-determined map - but rather to open oneself up to its multiplicity. The sonnets are not messages for the reader, or they are not written as a code for the reader to break, but they are meant to open a channel, a passageway for the readers to traverse in order to hear answers to the questions that they pose to the text. There is no final truth to be conveyed by the poet, because the poet has not seen it. Both hand and mind need to work together as the reader moves the cursor in <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> to experience the web of relations that connects human beings to nature and to natural cycles of life and death.</p>
<p>The print text of <span class="booktitle">V</span> serves as the external memory of <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> both for the reader and the writer and the combined work becomes more a journey to explore contemporary reading/writing practices. The interplay of the print <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span>, as external memory or database, and the electronic <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> sonnets bring to the forefront the materiality of the print text and how it differs from the electronic text. A reading session of Vniverse is definitely not the same as a reading session of the print <span class="booktitle">V</span>. The print text makes it possible to comprehend it in its entirely, as the reader can go back and forth to individual sonnets to see how they fit into the poet’s ecology of ideas which the reader has now made her own.</p>
<h2><span class="booktitle">V</span> as a Reflection on the Condition of Postmodernity</h2>
<p>In <span class="booktitle">The Politics of the Postmodern</span> Linda Hutcheon (1989) argues that cultural postmodernism has been wrongly charged with a lack of critical awareness as instead of promoting one specific world or worldview, it promotes eclecticism regarding the worlds, worldviews, historical periods, representational media or strategies. The critical postmodern literature in fact “foregrounds and thus contests the conventionality and unacknowledged ideology of that assumption of seamlessness [of history/fiction or world/art] and asks its readers to question the processes by which we represent our selves and our world to ourselves and to become aware of the means by which we make sense of and construct order out of our experience in a particular culture” (1989: 53-54). Strickland engages in postmodern re-appropriation of historical materials in V through evoking the life of Simone Weil. The evocation of Weil is not to provide one more interpretation of the specific events or figures in the past, but rather to insert them in the present so the present can be re-seen and re-evaluated with and against the past which in some cases has been forgotten and in other cases suppressed. Weil is the guiding force behind the poems in <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span> and her life is used as a lens to view human life and the world.</p>
<p>Strickland ‘s <span class="booktitle">V</span> does not just point to the conceptual universe of which it is a part, but it is an enaction of what it is to live and to create in a postmodern world. The creative vision does not necessarily involve mastering all discourses or embracing all cultures, but rather in opening a channel for seeing the web of relations that connect the worlds and worlds within worlds that we inhabit. <span class="booktitle">V</span> reflects on its own origins in multiple discourses of science, mathematics, poetry, philosophy, and biography. For the adult poet, each word holds a world of its own even as it is linked to hundreds of others. What appeared as divided and separate as a child to the poet now appears to her as an interconnected web of relations. Thus, the word ‘circuit’ or the word ‘lens’ evoke images of the circuits etched on silicon chips by women who sit in sanitized rooms looking though lenses, marking the chips. But whose markings are these? The question here alludes to the story of the exploited women who etch the marks on silicon chips, but the marks are not their own. Multiple discourses are embedded in this simple question which brings together the political, the scientific and the technical in one single question. The reader is thus provoked to get into a dialogue with the text to ask questions or to find answers as s/he disassembles the discourses that are brought together in the work.</p>
<p>A characteristic feature of a postmodern work like Strickland’s <span class="booktitle">V</span> is the proliferation of ruptures and discontinuities which are easier to plan and integrate in the web-base <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> than in the print <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span>. The disjunctions and jumps from one element to another become the pathways of forging relationships that gives the work its coherence. This aspect of Strickland’s work can be understood better through the comments Deleuze and Guattari (1996) make on the role of breaks and ruptures in a literary work. The ruptures and breaks are “productive, and are reassemblies in and of themselves. Disjunctions by the very fact that they are disjunctions, are inclusive” (42). Through ruptures, breaks and discontinuities, many disparate perspectives and viewpoints come together in the unified representational space without getting subsumed into a totality. The fragments retain their identity even as they forge relationship with one another to constitute a whole, which is constantly changing. In the impossibility of arriving at a single unified ground or single meaning in a complex shifting world, Strickland’s work becomes an assemblage constituted of heterogeneous worlds, which touch, collide, or interpenetrate. The telescopic multiple perspectives of the one world in the universe are replaced by multiple perspectives of multiple worlds, which actualize as innumerable diverging and converging series. In a digital representational space different meaning worlds come together. Multiple framed spaces are multiple perspectives of not a single unified reality, but rather of multiple worlds where each world has an ontologically different status.<cite class="note" id="note_6">McHale (1992) describes the shift from modernist to postmodernist writing in terms of a shift from the epistemological to the ontological dominant. Postmodern writers are concerned with ontological questions in how the multiple worlds come into existence, how they exist, collide and interpenetrate into one other.</cite></p>
<p>Such complex digital works through privileging multiplicity and heterogeneity provide a more inclusive field of conveying the experience of living in a complex world. This requires a shift in perspective from a vertical depth-based reading that focuses on what the work means to a horizontal surface reading to see how various worlds in the work relate to one another. The meaning-making is thus processual in nature as it traces the movement from one form to another and from one world to another. The relationships so forged tell more about the work, the reader and the writer. What emerges out of this shift is not only how to read a new media work, but rather what it means to live in a world with competing and interpenetrating realities.</p>
<p>Each session of <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> appears as an oral performance. A performance is contingent upon a variety of factors, the performer, the audience, and the setting where it is performed. Similarly in reading <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span>, all the above factors come into play as the reader, the machine interface and the database enter into an intricate dance. The onscreen display that materializes as a result of the interplay between the medium, the content, and reader has emergent qualities as it is time-bound and irreversible like an oral performance. The reader used to the stability of print text struggles to grasp the electronic sonnets in their totality by creating a memory theater in her mind, but is continually frustrated in that attempt. Perhaps that is exactly the point that the poet is making. Reading sonnets in the electronic medium is not about mastering the overall structure of the work and where individual sonnets fit, but it is rather to open oneself up to onscreen display and experience the relationships that it reveals. The electronic version thus is isomorphic with the world and the cosmos itself and the reader’s attitude toward it should be the same - to take one sonnet or sonnet fragment at a time and open oneself up to its reality.</p>
<h2>Bibliography</h2>
<p>Aarseth, Espen J. <span class="booktitle">Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature</span>. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.</p>
<p>Adams, Randy. “Stephanie Strickland.” <span class="booktitle">Trace Online Writing Center</span> <a class="outbound" href="http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/Review/index.cfm?article=30">http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/Review/index.cfm?article=30</a></p>
<p>Bolter, Jay David. <span class="booktitle">Writing Space: The Computer Hypertext and the History of Writing</span>. New Jersey, London. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991.</p>
<p>Brockelman, Thomas P. <span class="booktitle">Frame and the Mirror: On Collage and the Postmodern</span>. Northwestern University Press, 2000.</p>
<p>Coverley, M. D. <span class="booktitle">Califia</span>. Cambridge, Mass., Eastgate Systems, 2001.</p>
<p>Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. <span class="booktitle">Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia</span>. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.</p>
<p>Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. <span class="booktitle">Franz Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature</span>. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.</p>
<p>Eskelinen, Markku. “Cybertext Theory and Literary Studies.” <span class="booktitle">Electronic Book Review</span>. Accessed on April 25, 2002. <a class="internal" href="http://www.electronicbookreview.com/ebr12/eskel.htm">http://www.electronicbookreview.com/ebr12/eskel.htm</a></p>
<p>Funkhouser, Chris “Bridge Work: <span class="booktitle">V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L’una” Electronic Book Review/American Book Review</span> (2003). <a class="internal" href="http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/superdense">http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/superdense</a></p>
<p>Harries Karsten. <span class="booktitle">The Broken Frame: Three Lectures</span>. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press of America, 1989.</p>
<p>Hayles, Katherine N. “Cyberlliterature and Multicourses: Rescuing Electronic Literature from Infanticide.” <a class="outbound" href="h!m://www.altx.com/ebr/riQoste/riQll/riQl1hay.htrn">h!m://www.altx.com/ebr/riQoste/riQll/riQl1hay.htrn</a></p>
<p>—. <span class="booktitle">Writing Machine</span>. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2002.</p>
<p>Jackson, Shelley. <span class="booktitle">Judges’ Remarks</span>. The 2nd trAce/Alt-X New Media Writing Competition, 2001. <a class="outbound" href="http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/newmedia/remarks.cfm">http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/newmedia/remarks.cfm</a></p>
<p>Joyce, Michael. <span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics</span>. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995.</p>
<p>Landow, George P. <span class="booktitle">Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology</span>. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992.</p>
<p>Landow, George P. “Hypertext as Collage Writing.” <span class="booktitle">The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media</span>. Ed. Peter Lunenfeld . Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1999. 150-170.</p>
<p>Lanham, Richard A. <span class="booktitle">The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts</span>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.</p>
<p>McCann, Janet. “V: Waveson.nets, Losing L’una.” <span class="booktitle">Smartish Pace</span>. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.smartishpace.com/home/reviews_strick.html">http://www.smartishpace.com/home/reviews_strick.html</a></p>
<p>Manovich, Lev. <span class="booktitle">The Language of New Media</span>. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001.</p>
<p>McHale, Brian. <span class="booktitle">Constructing Postmodernism</span>. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.</p>
<p>Moulthrop, Stuart. “Rhizome and Resistance: Hypertext and the Dream of a New Culture.” <span class="booktitle">Hyper/Text/Theory</span>. Ed. George P. Landow. Baltimore, London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994</p>
<p>Muratori, Fred “Intertextu[re]ality” at Electronic Poetry Review #5. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.poetry.org/issues/issue5/text/prose/muratori1.htm">http://www.poetry.org/issues/issue5/text/prose/muratori1.htm</a></p>
<p>Odin, Jaishree. “Image and Text in Hypermedia Literature: The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot.” <span class="booktitle">The Iowa Review Web</span>. Accessed August 16, 2004 <a class="outbound" href="http://www.uiowa.edu/%7eiareview/tirweb/feature/strickland/index.html">http://www.uiowa.edu/%7Eiareview/tirweb/feature/strickland/index.html#</a></p>
<p>Strickland, Stephanie. Into the Space of Previously Undrawable Diagrams: An Interview with Stephanie Strickland by Jaishree Odin. <span class="booktitle">Iowa Web Review</span>. Accessed August 16, 2004 <a class="outbound" href="http://www.uiowa.edu/%7eiareview/tirweb/feature/strickland/index.html">http://www.uiowa.edu/%7Eiareview/tirweb/feature/strickland/index.html</a></p>
<p>—. <span class="booktitle">V: Losing L’una/ WaveSon.nets</span>. New York: Penguin, 2002.</p>
<p>Strickland, Stephanie and Cynthia Lawson. ;<span class="booktitle">V: Vniverse</span>. <a class="outbound" href="http://vniverse.com">http://vniverse.com</a></p>
<p>Strickland, Stephanie and Cynthia Lawson. “Making the Vniverse by Strickland and Lawson” Accessed August 16, 2004 <a class="outbound" href="http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/strickland/essay/index.html">http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/strickland/essay/index.html</a> <span class="booktitle">Women, Art, and Technology</span>. Ed. Judy Malloy. Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2004.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/strickland">Strickland</a>, <a href="/tags/manovich">manovich</a>, <a href="/tags/hayles">hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodernism">postmodernism</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1230 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comJoseph McElroy's Cyborg Plushttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/seeing
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Salvatore Proietti</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-08-18</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h2>1. All around <span class="booktitle">Plus</span></h2>
<p>What do we gain in looking at Joseph McElroy’s <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> as, among other things, a science-fiction novel? <cite id="note_1">Along with the experience of translating <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> and the essay ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light” into Italian, I recently had two chances in Rome to talk about McElroy, a doctoral seminar on Beckett and a conference on Emerson. I acknowledge my gratitude to the organizers, Professors Agostino Lombardo, Giorgio Mariani, and Igina Tattoni, as well as to Daniela Daniele who first alerted me about this project.</cite> In science fiction, a literalized metaphor is extended and made to become the narrative center of a possible, estranged world, as theorists have argued (cf. Suvin). My reading of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> focuses on the presence of the icon of the compound entity, organic and technological at the same time, which science and science fiction have called the “cyborg.” Throughout its history, this metaphor has been put to manifold uses: agent of unrestrained power and authority, form of absolute subjection and dispossession, attempt at hopeful interaction between humans and technology.</p>
<p>Despite long and sustained attention from critics, science fiction appears not to have made it into respectability, and cautious caveats continue to accompany many readers’ responses when facing texts and authors deemed worthy of critical praise. In the specific case of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, critics have both argued and denied its generic status (respectively, cf. LeClair’s introduction to the 1987 edition [v], and Hadas), and only in the 1990s did references to the cyborg begin to appear (Tabbi 145). In general, analyzing such a struggle for legitimacy would lead a long way into both aesthetic and institutional issues, in which old-fashioned standards of timelessness are still applied by commentators who regard with suspicion the use of metaphors whose “technological” or “scientific” signifiers (whether coming from “hard” or “soft” sciences) are hopelessly bound to historical contingency, haunted by the specter of a readership not necessarily coinciding with the “distinction” of canonicity. With regard to McElroy, the “disproportion between accomplishment and recognition” pointed out by Tom LeClair (ibid.) might precisely stem from an emphasis on science unparalleled among contemporary Anglophone novelists.</p>
<p>For our purposes, it might suffice to say that <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> is, among other things, the best science-fiction novel written in the 1970s by a non-specialized writer. Formally speaking, its focus on the standpoint of the cyborg, providing an inside view of the consciousness of the (semi-)artificial intelligence, brings <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> closer to a genre novel such as Pat Cadigan’s 1993 <span class="booktitle">Fools</span> (another novel about a search for memories) rather than to a highbrow take such as Richard Powers’ <span class="booktitle">Galatea 2.2</span>: if the latter is a novel about the confrontation with the posthuman, McElroy and Cadigan’s protagonists try to enact what <span class="lightEmphasis">being</span> posthuman might be like.</p>
<p>Among McElroy’s works, the presence of science-fictional motifs also haunts <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span>. And in going through the essays reprinted in his recent Italian collection, <span class="booktitle">Exponential</span>, one finds many references to science-fiction writers and works: from precursors such as Samuel Butler (16) and Jules Verne (38); to contemporary genre classics such as Arthur C. Clarke’s <span class="booktitle">2001: A Space Odyssey</span> (32-4, 37), J. G. Ballard (47, 55, 64, 76), and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s <span class="booktitle">The Sirens of Titan</span>, in conjunction with mentions of William Burroughs and cyberpunk (75); to non-specialized examples such as Richard Powers (78), John Barth’s <span class="booktitle">Giles Goat-Boy</span> (34, 54, 76), William Hjortsberg’s cyborg novel <span class="booktitle">Gray Matters</span> (58), and Italo Calvino’s <span class="booktitle">Cosmicomics</span> cycle, along with a story from that cycle’s immediate model in Italian literature, Primo Levi’s collection <span class="booktitle">The Periodic Table</span> (69-70). <span class="booktitle">Exponential</span> also contains reviews of Calvino’s <span class="booktitle">Invisible Cities</span> (115-9) and Samuel Beckett’s <span class="booktitle">The Lost Ones</span> (125-9), both at least marginally science-fictional texts. To these I would add the mentions of Doris Lessing’s <span class="booktitle">The Four-Gated City</span> and, again, of Calvino in LeClair and McCaffery’s interview (238, 244) - different facets in a consistent tradition of literature exploring the territories of science.</p>
<p>The metaphor of the cyborg has a very long history in 20th century science and science fiction, which here can only be hinted at. <cite id="note_2">I tried to examine this history in my unpublished PhD dissertation. For some probings into cyberpunk discourse, cf. my “Jeremiad” and “Bodies.”</cite> Heads or minds separated from bodies: an age-old dream, or nightmare, with intertextual resonances emerging so strongly that isolating dominant texts and filiations is virtually impossible. Much is at stake in this metaphor and in all discourses evoking it, with fiction and nonfiction creating two parallel histories with mutually communicating rhetorics. Since the beginning in the 1920s, in the speculations of scientists such as J. D. Bernal and J. B. S. Haldane, personal body, body politic, and space have been interacting. In Bernal’s <span class="booktitle">The World, the Flesh, and the Devil</span> (1929), the “colonization of space and the mechanization of the body are obviously complementary” (73): cosmic policing and prosthetic technology will free the human mind from all material fetters and ensure its undying control over the universe. Individual self-sufficiency and will to expansiveness are the collective ideals incarnated in a view of the body such as that of Alexis Carrel, Nobel-prize winning pioneer of transplant technology, who sees in his popular <span class="booktitle">Man, the Unknown</span> (1935) skin and body surfaces as “the almost perfect fortified frontier of a closed world” (65).</p>
<p>And since the 1930s, U.S. pulp authors powerfully include semi-artificial humans and brains encased in boxes in the repertoire of their imagery, often drawing on Darwinian and eugenic myths: tales on transparent eyeballs being nothing and seeing all, dominating space and other people, parables on technoscientific hubris, in different degrees of tension between empowerment and socialization.</p>
<p>Officially, the birth of the cyborg takes place in 1960 at a conference held at Brooks Air Force Base, Texas, in a paper delivered by physicians Nathan S. Kline and Manfred Clynes, entitled “Drugs, Space, and Cybernetics: Evolution to Cyborgs.” In their view, the cyborg prefigures the advent and triumph of “participant evolution”: (military) science and technology are about to make possible the planning and designing of infinite variants of <span class="lightEmphasis">homo sapiens</span>, able to live long and prosper in the worlds of space exploration. This new entity “deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments.” Body processes and the attendant “robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, thus freeing man to explore, to create, to think, and to feel” (347-8). Their epic narrative of mastery over the universe, while ostensibly foregrounding a pluralism of embodiments, posits not only a mechanistic view of the body, but also a faith and hope in its irrelevance and coming supersession: the self-regulating, homeostatic balance along the boundary of the interface between organic and inorganic components renders the cyborg less an empowered body than an armored mind. The body mechanic is the body obsolete, a pure thinking apparatus, who has broken free of the devilish materiality of world and flesh: a literal self-made man, capable of “adapting his body to whatever milieu he chooses (345).</p>
<p>With its Protean self-making act and its asocial expansive thrust, the cyborg is ready to connect into the mainstream of U.S. national mythology. Following in the steps of early cyberneticians such as Norbert Wiener and Vannevar Bush, Kline and Clynes also present their creation as conqueror of a “New Frontier” (347). In this vein, before cyberpunk made science fiction part of the postmodernist narrative, two decades crowded with theory, fiction, and popularization had established a rhetoric centered on the drive toward the limitless frontiers of scientific imagination. This rhetoric, turning ostensible symbiosis and coupling into (self)instrumentalization, was - and to a great extent still is - divided between celebrations of omnipotence soon to come and specular humanistic recoils from reification, but united in saluting the cyborg, either with enthusiasm or with dismay, as a new beginning for the American self (cderf. Martin), launched toward definitive abandonment of the body and of history: Leo Marx’s technological sublime as a dream come true for the individual and as an analogue for the nation (cf. Wilson).</p>
<p>As studies such as Mark Dery’s <span class="booktitle">Escape Velocity</span> and N. Katherine Hayles’ <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman</span> show, at the core of much theorizing about the posthuman still lie those same dreams - informed with a technological determinism which figures such as Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler have updated and popularized for the contemporary age. From the science-fiction field the responses to this finalistic narrative have been more nuanced, exploring the cyborg identity in detail, with a keener awareness that both personal bodies and the body politic are made of very resistant materials, all of which (including ethics and language) must be considered on their own terms. The very root of the genre, inherent to the idea that science and technology can become usable tools for literature, is a deep faith in metaphor, in the hope that possible worlds can be created in the reader’s mind capable of providing estranged versions of its own world. As Darko Suvin writes, these fictions are complex parables, not mechanic allegories (“homologies,” as McElroy describes his attempt in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> in many of his essays: cf. ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light” and <span class="booktitle">Exponential</span> 81): linguistic creations, but nevertheless narratively solid and reconstructible, always meant to achieve an inner consistency. In this, science fiction has always proposed a challenge that appears to escape the dichotomy between ontology and epistemology, between world and interpretation: the science-fictional worlds have at their center an “absent paradigm” (Angenot) just as Faulkner’s have at their center a “climactic ellipsis” (Materassi) <cite id="note_3">Both these notions (ironically resonating, I realize as I write, with the matter at hand), in different ways, might also be pertinent to the themes of McElroy’s The Letter Left to Me, a novel of endurance in the face of loss whose Beckettian undertones are no less strong than those of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>.</cite> : the interpretive quest of the reader, ultimately, consists in recostructing the world the narration itself is an emanation of. Therefore, I would maintain that the relevance of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> lies in its taking its central metaphor seriously and in its own terms. <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> goes much further and deeper than texts that “simply” (quotation marks are due, of course, in order not to unduly belittle achievements such as Powers’ <span class="booktitle">Galatea 2.2</span> or Barth’s <span class="booktitle">Giles Goat-Boy</span>) explore it for its impact on an observer who is participant but ultimately safely on the outside of the boundary between science and the body. Thus, I would argue that one tenor of McElroy’s multiplex parable is the assertion that such a somewhat nostalgic intellectual figure still belonging to a separate sphere is no longer conceivable. McElroy’s cyborg’s tale “told from within” is an example of pure science fiction, of what science fiction should be, of what all important science fiction manages to be.</p>
<h2>2. In Touch with Imp Plus</h2>
<p>In the critical mainstream surrounding <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, many have read the novel as an example of a “world elsewhere” created by an empowered self (cf. Brooke-Rose; LeClair, Art 144-6; Miller), a Cartesian subject dominating a literally mechanized <span class="lightEmphasis">res extensa</span>. In such analyses, cybernetics provides a template for self-sustaining aesthetic autonomy (cf. Porush, <span class="booktitle">Fiction</span>). Rather, I would read <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, the interior monologue of the brain of a dying scientist implanted into an orbiting satellite, as an early metafictional, intertextual critique of the rhetoric of absolute, empowering openness, and of transcendence through disembodiment.</p>
<p>My analysis will follow, in the progress of Imp Plus’ linguistic and cognitive self-awareness, the tension between openness and closure, between expansion (or retreat?) into an undifferentiated void and the (re)discovery and inescapable necessity of coming to terms with its own new bodily being, with the world and with otherness. I will read its final act as the double rejection of both the myth of the instrumental body and of the myth of unfettered expansiveness - that is, of the most widespread ideological assumptions underlying the rhetoric of human-technological interfaces (either in the years preceding the publication of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> or in much current “cyberculture”).</p>
<p>As the novel starts, the explanted brain is indeed a literalization of Emerson’s classic transparent eyeball scenario: a <span class="lightEmphasis">tabula rasa</span> hooked into an “Interplanetary Monitoring Platform” experimenting on solar energy storing devices, perceiving himself against the background of a surrounding void. But in the very act of self-perception - an act of feeling, an act of imagining - Emerson’s <span class="booktitle">Nature</span> is powerfully revised:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">He found it all around. It opened and was close. He felt it was itself, but felt it was more.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">It nipped open from outside in and from inside out. Imp Plus found it all around, and this was not the start. (3)</p>
<p>For Imp Plus, this feeling of openness and openendedness brings about the awareness of a previous existence. The emergence of his own self is never privileged as a creation <span class="lightEmphasis">ex nihilo</span>, and involves a two-way traffic, a true interaction between subject and world. Imp Plus’ acquisition of language also starts from scraps of past and present experiences and not from scratch. Consistent with this, language and vision (being and understanding, ontology and epistemology, self-scrutiny and outward observation) are facets of the same drive: ” <span class="lightEmphasis">see</span> was the need or effect of <span class="lightEmphasis">say</span> ” (143). As in Emerson’s <span class="booktitle">Divinity School Address</span>, here too “always the seer is the sayer. Somehow his dream is told…clearest and most permanent in words” (78). Imp Plus’ first metalinguistic remark is about sight: “Socket was a word” (3). In learning how to see himself, he learns how to say himself. This is the experience he describes, over and over, as “lifting,” as he acquires (at once acquiring again and acquiring anew) the language with which to express his condition, and to communicate it to others. What he perceives and communicates, though - and this is definitely unlike Emerson - is the birth of a body. The attempt of overcoming dispossession and instrumentalization can only be predicated on physical existence; his first attempts at articulate communications will be about the development of his new perceptual system, centering on the imagery of growth - a growth involving a process of cellular fusion and differentiation of unheard-of proportions, and allowing a new consciousness, capable of acting beyond originally programmed routine operations, to emerge together with the new body.</p>
<p>From the very first page of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, memories start coming in, sketches from a fragmented mind trickling in recurring associations, scenes, as well as isolated words and phrases. And what makes this protagonist unforgettably moving is his unceasing quest for love among the ruins of a past which does not even yield his “human” name: moments back on Earth, ill and dying, with wife and daughter; moments with a “woman at the California sea,” and with another one met shortly before the final operation of brain excision, “by the Mexican fire” (109), which also triggers images of birds and the sun. In the past and in the present, in emotions and body, the sun resonates as a salvific force, just like the repeated reminiscence about the encounter with the blind, bandaged “news vendor,” who manages to compensate for his sightlessness and keeps trying to perceive the world. Most disturbing are the conversations with the “Acrid Voice,” who tells him that the eventual orbital decay of the satellite might somehow be controlled (perhaps with the brain’s own help), so that he might be recovered, but who left too many doubts to be fully believable.</p>
<p>In the following chapters the disordered accumulation of memories slowly and progressively coalesces into semantic clusters of highly specialized languages associated with biology, alternating and coexisting with an initially minimal vocabulary, articulated through an incremental process of linguistic redundancy and overload (cf. LeClair “McElroy”), of repetition with variants:</p>
<p>Imp Plus caved out. There was a lifting all around, and Imp Plus knew there was no skull. But there had been another lifting and he had wanted it, but then that lifting had not been good. He did not want to go back to it. He did not know if that lifting had been bad. But this new lifting was good. (3)</p>
<p>If Imp Plus is a cyborg, it is one very much like that of Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” among many other reasons because in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> there is no nostalgia for any idealized past experience: Imp Plus’ past as an integral human is one source of his present state as an integrated cyborg, not the goal or hope of a fullness he strives for. As the new identity develops, the organic and the inorganic are bound to interact, without according either component any superior or inferior status. And this past has no intrinsic ethical connotations, is the site of both positive and negative present sensations.</p>
<p>In the above quoted third paragraph, ethics is introduced in the shape of ambiguity: there are, within Imp Plus’ words, a number of types and meanings of “lifting,” and the option between good and bad shows up as inescapable, if not always with a clear-cut value judgment following it: the lifting of the brain from the body (from “the skull”), the launch into space, the activation of the new system of (self-)perception. And somewhere in the background, an echo from that solitary “head” in Emerson’s <span class="booktitle">Nature</span>, “uplifted into infinite space”, intent on being “nothing” and “see[ing] all,” throwing at the self and at others a literal and imaginative imperative: “Build…your own world” (Emerson 6, 46). Here, though, there is no lifted mind prior to the world-building striving: the entire novel, indeed, portrays the mutual construction of a subject and its surroundings. Linking both is the former’s will to existence, a choice and a longing which for the semiartificial being is no less (perhaps, more), as it were, heartfelt than it would be for an ordinary human.</p>
<p>The only automatism in Imp Plus’ action is his choosing to perceive its own self, rejecting the position of mere “monitor,” receptor or reflector, passively intent on perceiving the outside. In doing so, he refuses the master narrative of the cyborg as instrumental body (upheld by cyberneticians and other rhapsodes of the posthuman), which means for him being <span class="lightEmphasis">somebody else’s</span> instrument, and instead embraces another longing, which sees the technologizing of the body as the possible catalyst for a new fulfilling relation between subject and object. There is a contest for autonomy going on inside the cyborg body, but it is a contest in which there is no direct relation between component and axiology: organic vs. inorganic are not equated to whole vs. reified (as in classic liberal attitudes) or to obsolete vs. futuristic (as in teleologic-posthumanist speculations). Both elements can be the site of such a contest, and their inevitable interaction can bring about further complication; as Haraway writes, “the relation between organism and machine has been a border war [involving] <span class="lightEmphasis">pleasure</span> in the construction of boundaries and… <span class="lightEmphasis">responsibility</span> in their construction” (150).</p>
<p>Many are the boundaries crossed by McElroy’s cyborg self. Fragmented as he is, Imp Plus (the “more,” the “Plus” supplementing the “he” with the “it” - after all, “Imp Plus” = “I am “Plus,” as noted by LeClair [“McElroy” 35]) will become a multiply inclusive being, holding together two <span class="lightEmphasis">kinds</span> of components, not just two items: organic elements include the brain and the nutrients he is inserted in (vegetables and glucose are mentioned), connected with several computer and measuring systems. In this way, the “cognitive estrangement” (Suvin) of this science-fictional situation presents the reader with a surprising, hopeful possibility of heterogeneous wholeness; as McElroy said in his interview with LeClair and McCaffery, “I also saw in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> the good old theme of reintegrating the body and the soul, a dynamic drama of growth, unexpected growth” (239). And, as he commented in ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light,” about the reformulation of personal autonomy in the age of technology: “In <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, in Imp Plus, you have something in between instrument and person. In the beginning you do.”</p>
<p>In this complicated drama of desire and frustration, all the verbal games redefine but never erase the presence of a consciousness. Whereas the reader might be baffled by the juxtaposition of indirect and free indirect discourse, in the novel most glaring for his listeners on Earth is the confusion within Imp Plus’ communication between the speech of his operative functions and the speech of self-reflection, which leads him to evoke the “shadows” of his memories in one of his dialogues with Ground Control: “The answer was that Imp Plus was able to think in transmission” (11). Bakhtinian and not Chomskyan, he has the ability to think dialogically; his self-perception is connected to communication with others. And he learns how to lie.</p>
<p>If Imp Plus opens his self-expression by talking about an opening, as he begins to gain some degree of self-awareness, the awareness of a distinction between self and world, between the <span class="lightEmphasis">he</span> and the <span class="lightEmphasis">it</span> of his first sentence, brings about a degree of closure. As in frontier discourse the advance of the settlement can only be the cause of a receding of the open territory, in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> pleasure can only be shaped by the needs and responsibilities of selfhood:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Everywhere he went there was a part just missing. A particle of difference. And in its place an inclination, a sharp drop.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">And through this Imp Plus thought: or was suddenly looking back at having thought: that those particles that were just missing were driven away by the aim of his looking: and that his sight was the Sun’s force turned back into light in him by means of an advanced beam. He had many aims. He?… The Sun in Imp Plus was one eye; and if so what might be two? It was the chance of something.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">What came to Imp Plus amid the brightness was that some of him was left.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">So some of the gradients were Imp Plus.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Which was why he could fall into himself. (6)</p>
<p>Imp Plus’ outward drive, almost immediately, encounters the limitations of identity, even as he strives toward other purposes (“aims”) than those imposed upon him by the controlling agencies from Earth, and finds among the signals another sight worth detecting (that is, himself). As the potential becomes actual, as that “chance” becomes the possibility of “something” specific, his vocabulary translates all this into images of a downhill course: a Fall for the cyborg.</p>
<p>At the end of Chapter 2, already “the more that was all around was getting closer and closer to Imp Plus” (22): as he builds himself, he also builds a boundary <span class="lightEmphasis">around</span> his self, meeting constriction while at the same time looking for freedom. In this condition, the cybernetic feedback of a character bootstrapping himself into selfhood can only appear as suffering, as the loss of a Beckettian sort of pre-Oedipal bliss: “He had nothing to stand on; the bulge he was on was himself. The bulge was on the brink of the cleft, the cleft was in a fold, the fold was more open, and when it was all open it would not be a fold. He could not help wanting this, but with each unfolding a fold was gone” (98).</p>
<p>As flashes and associations keep bringing back his past existence, body and human connections become a pervasive “absence” (136), “emptiness” (195), “vacancy” (196), which must be compared with the present situation: “Words remembering other words, but new words for what he had become” (142). At the threshold between past embodiment and present disembodiment, Imp Plus imagines himself as a personified “fence” (151, 159), imposing limits upon what could only have been a source of perfect fulfillment as an unfulfilled promise of boundless openness to be contemplated from the edge. As Imp Plus’ memory progresses - as his contacts with Ground Control continue - past connections appear more and more vivid and more and more distant, in “an emptiness of reciprocal failure to be remembered between them in which they began to share if not know what was escaping each other’s thought” (212).</p>
<p>Words are also presences surrounding him and linking him with Earth: Ground Control, Travel Light (Travelling on Light, Operation TL), Cap Com, the Good Voice and the Acrid Voice, and the Dim Echo, which is both outside Imp Plus’ new being and a part of him, wholly subordinate to the Ground agencies - ironically, the closest thing to an “original” self he can claim (and whom he can access far less easily than Ground). For Imp Plus and for the reader of his story, the ghostly presence he calls the Dim Echo is an ominous, cold reminder that the semi-artificial being might be more human (more humane) than the remnants of his flesh-and-blood human counterpart. Keeping them all together, keeping together what he describes as a “great lattice,” within and around himself, the light: a connection which is immaterial, but emotionally and physically real.</p>
<p>Sensations and emotions are the part of the past he is still reaching out for:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Imp Plus wanted to find the foot he had put in the yellow leather shoe; to find the voice in which he had told the blind news vendor in that cold place in another sea, “That’s my daughter,” as she ran down the pavement to meet the dark-haired woman. He wanted to find…the eyes to see spilt blood, spilt smells, the point of jokes, things not so beautiful as what had come to him through growth… (204)</p>
<p>But one of his ties with the past is hardly conducive to hope: “the Acrid inferences would not let up” (ibid.), confirming that his fate lies in his present state; he can’t go home again: “He had to see his being only as it was now” (143).</p>
<p>And the way he is now is determined by those unknown forces who try to keep him under control, for unstated (given the origin of cyborg speculations, we have to ask, military?) purposes. Knowing, growing, search for origins, self-determination, all are mediated and shaped in the proud construction of language right at the moment in which deconstruction (or <span class="lightEmphasis">un</span> construction) appears triumphant. Self-diminishment, like Bartleby’s anorexia, could be a way of imposing one’s own vanishing self as a felt absence. And yet <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> is all about the recreation of a <span class="lightEmphasis">presence</span>: not (as in Ihab Hassan’s <span class="booktitle">The Dismemberment of Orpheus</span>) a literature of silence, but a literature <span class="lightEmphasis">out</span> of silence and speechlessness (in a confrontation with “Voices”): a will to remaking when the unmaking process is spreading everywhere.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, in other words, reinterprets its acknowledged sources, Samuel Beckett’s <span class="booktitle">The Lost Ones</span> and the history of Moon flights (especially Apollo 13) as parables of impossibility of control over personal and collective existence, and of endurance and defense of dignity in such a condition of isolation. Space might be a trap, but offers also a dream never to be discarded. And thinking of McElroy’s references to Calvino, we could probably add the <span class="booktitle">Cosmicomics’</span> protagonist, Qwfwq, as a source for McElroy’s fascination with weightlessness (a keyword in Calvino, of course) already pointed out by Tony Tanner (Scenes 207-37).</p>
<p>As in the previously quoted passage from Emerson, in both seeing and saying, Imp Plus as well is looking for some kind of permanence. So, the most Beckettian passages in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> are its strongest affirmations of hope: “Imp Plus knew he had no eyes. Yet Imp Plus saw. Or persisted in seeing” (3). And later:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">He had no choice but to go on to understand what was going on. No choice he thought but to be centered and to see out from the brain hub, but then in from the body bonds; see meanwhile from the rounds of tendril bendings up out of cells near an open cleft to those message rounds pressed small in the bulb-bun of branchings at the rear of the brain, to (then) the fine turn of a limb tip finding a nearby limb to join or a bulkhead shine to brush. He thought in the pieces - he did not know how except that the pieces whether refracting in toward a center he hardly had any more or aiming each its own moves separate along a many-sided tissue of inclination were him. So Imp Plus tried to take heed, tried to think - what was it? (118)</p>
<p>Centerless and multiplex, shapeless and manifold (in this, similar to many protagonists of contemporary U.S. fiction, as Tony Tanner argued in <span class="booktitle">City of Words</span>), his new identity thrills and scares Imp Plus at the same time:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Him.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">He found it on his mouth and in his breath. <span class="lightEmphasis">Him</span>. A thing in all of him. But now he wasn’t sure. He saw he’d felt this <span class="lightEmphasis">him</span> in the brain. But where was it now? In too many centers.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">And there was a shifting like the subtraction of a land mass so two or more seas that had been apart now slid together. What happened to this <span class="lightEmphasis">him</span>? (114)</p>
<p>The scary part is that any process bears the mark of inherent instability: any growth can become a decline: “He was not just increasing. He could become less” (132). After all, he will never be isolated by the rest of “humanity,” just as he has never been; the threat of the “Concentration Loop” will always accompany him: “Which meant Imp <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> would be in touch with Ground again” (155).</p>
<p>In the end he is forced to consider the alternatives, which he tries to sort out with his new powers (as McElroy writes in ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light,” Imp is “evidently neuro-connected to Ground Control, word-wired, linked electronically, pulse-translatable evidently into communicable sounds - thought-wired?”: a form of telepathy?):</p>
<p class="longQuotation">So he began to answer and to ask. And while the IMP twisted, tumbled, spun, and pushed into lesser orbits, Imp Plus talked to the familiar ovals of the Acrid Voice. And not knowing where to begin, he used old words the Acrid Voice used. Words sometimes that the Acrid Voice had been going to use. But more wonderful than this in all the words that passed was what they lacked. It was far more than the words were equal to.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Imp Plus felt it all around. If he did not wish to tell Ground that what had been at first a body grown like a starfish of mouthless hydra seemed now other than body, wish faded into inability which was in turn only a shadow thrown by his sense that he could preserve what the Sun hoped they might become. (184)</p>
<p>He can cooperate in order to be retrieved, he can run away toward deep space: but then, both these options would mean accepting the patterns of instrumentalization and asocial empowerment the Powers-That-Be hope to incarnate in the cyborg body, whereas Imp Plus wants and needs connection and, above all, communication: “He had to tell all the truth he knew” (201).</p>
<p>The final question from Ground, as he is about to enter the Earth atmosphere toward likely self-destruction, has obvious allegorical undertones: “DO YOU HAVE POWER? ” (214). His self may have been developing, but rather than “transcendence through power” and the “mastery…of the re-creative intellect” (Miller 175, 177), McElroy and his cyborg seem preoccupied with the uncertainty of an alienated interiority, and Imp Plus’ answer is “YES AND NO… <span class="lightEmphasis">No desire to carom into space, no desire for re-entry</span> ” (214-5).</p>
<p>In concomitantly refusing to act as pure instrument, and to accept the mythologies of individual expansiveness, McElroy’s cyborg satellite restores a role to embodiment. As Tabbi writes, the “body he desires, like any sublime object, is made all the more painfully real to Imp Plus by virtue of its unattainability” (143). The finale of Imp Plus’ story appears to be a heroic sacrifice in the quest for a fulfilling form of literally limited, yet non-alienated self.</p>
<p>Something very solid melts into air in this ending: this is a defeat. And yet, this defeated, powerless science-fictional being ironically incarnates a hope. In Daniele’s interview, McElroy talks about the need for moving away and beyond wholesale rejections of technology, so common among intellectuals, and provocatively evokes Thoreau in connection with <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> (100). And ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light” concludes by describing the novel as a science-fictional pastoral idyll. And indeed, skeptical as it is, <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> appears to have been literally an ironic novel about the construction of a garden in the middle of the machine. A postmodern novel about innocence.</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Angenot, Marc. “The Absent Paradigm.” <span class="journaltitle">Science-Fiction Studies</span> 6 (1979): 9-19.</p>
<p>Bernal, J. D. <span class="booktitle">The World, the Flesh, and the Devil</span>. London: Kegan, 1929.</p>
<p>Brooke-Rose, Christine. <span class="booktitle">A Rhetoric of the Unreal</span>. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.</p>
<p>Cadigan, Pat. <span class="booktitle">Fools</span>. New York: Bantam, 1993.</p>
<p>Carrel, Alexis. <span class="booktitle">Man, the Unknown</span>. New York: Harper, 1935.</p>
<p>Daniele, Daniela. “Joseph McElroy: Cervelli in orbita.” <span class="booktitle">Scrittori e finzioni d’America</span>. Ed. Daniela Daniele. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000. 97-102.</p>
<p>Dery, Mark. <span class="booktitle">Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century</span>. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996.</p>
<p>Emerson, Ralph Waldo. <span class="booktitle">Selected Prose and Poetry</span>. Ed. Reginald L. Cook. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1950.</p>
<p>Hadas, Pamela W. “Green Thoughts on Being in Charge: Discovering Joseph McElroy’s <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>.” <span class="journaltitle">Review of Contemporary Fiction</span> 10 (1990): 140-55.</p>
<p>Hassan, Ihab. <span class="booktitle">The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Towards a Postmodern Literature</span>. New York: Oxford UP, 1982.</p>
<p>Haraway, Donna J. <span class="booktitle">Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature</span>. New York: Routledge, 1991.</p>
<p>Hayles, N. Katherine. <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics</span>. Chicago: U. of Chicago P, 1999.</p>
<p>Kline, Nathan S., and Manfred Clynes. “Drugs, Space, and Cybernetics: Evolution to Cyborgs.” <span class="booktitle">Psychophysiological Aspects of Space Flight</span>. Ed. Bernard E. Flaherty. New York: Columbia UP, 1961. 345-71.</p>
<p>LeClair, Tom. <span class="booktitle">The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction</span>. Urbana: U. of Illinois P, 1989.</p>
<p>–. Introduction. Joseph McElroy. <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1987. v-x.</p>
<p>–. “Joseph McElroy and the Art of Excess.” <span class="journaltitle">Contemporary Literature</span> 21 (1980): 15-37.</p>
<p>– and Larry McCaffery. “Interview with Joseph McElroy.” <span class="booktitle">Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists</span>. Ed. Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1983. 235-51.</p>
<p>Materassi, Mario. “The Model of Climactic Ellipsis, or, The Event as Mask.” <span class="booktitle">The Artist and His Masks: William Faulkner’s Metafiction</span>. Ed. Agostino Lombardo. Rome: Bulzoni, 1991. 193-9.</p>
<p>Martin, Terence. <span class="booktitle">Parables of Possibility: The American Need for Beginnings</span>. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.</p>
<p>McElroy, Joseph. <span class="booktitle">Exponential</span>. Trans. Mario Marchetti. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003.</p>
<p>–. <span class="booktitle">The Letter Left To Me</span>. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1990.</p>
<p>–. <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>. 1976. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1987.</p>
<p>–. ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light.” Unpublished. [Italian ed. ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light: Scienza e letteratura.” Trans. Salvatore Proietti. <span class="journaltitle">Lo Straniero</span> 30-31 (2002): 105-114.]</p>
<p>McHale, Brian. <span class="booktitle">Postmodernist Fiction</span>. New York: Methuen, 1987.</p>
<p>Miller, Alicia M. “Power and Perception in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>.” <span class="journaltitle">Review of Contemporary Fiction</span> 10 (1990): 173-80.</p>
<p>Porush, David. <span class="booktitle">The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction</span>. New York: Methuen, 1985.</p>
<p>Powers, Richard. <span class="booktitle">Galatea 2.2</span>. New York: Farrar, 1995.</p>
<p>Proietti, Salvatore. “Bodies, Ghosts, and Global Virtualities: On Gibson and English-Canadian Cyberculture.” <span class="booktitle">Il Canada e le culture della globalizzazione</span>. Ed. Alfredo Rizzardi and Giovanni Dotoli. Fasano, Italy: Schena, 2001. 479-94.</p>
<p>–. <span class="booktitle">The Cyborg, Cyberspace, and North American Science Fiction</span>. Ph.D. diss., McGill U, 1998.</p>
<p>–. “The Informatic Jeremiad: The Virtual Frontier and U.S. Cyberculture.” <span class="booktitle">Science Fiction: Critical Frontiers</span>. Ed. Karen Sayer and John Moore. London: Macmillan and New York: St.Martin’s P, 2000. 116-26.</p>
<p>Suvin, Darko. <span class="booktitle">Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction</span>. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1988.</p>
<p>Tabbi, Joseph. <span class="booktitle">Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk</span>. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995.</p>
<p>Tanner, Tony. <span class="booktitle">City of Words</span>. London: Cape, 1971.</p>
<p>–. <span class="booktitle">Scenes of Nature, Signs of Man</span>. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.</p>
<p>Wilson, Rob. “Techno-Euphoria and the Discourse of the American Sublime.” <span class="journaltitle">Boundary</span> 2 19 (1992): 205-29.</p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/salvatore-proietti">Salvatore Proietti</a>, <a href="/tags/proietti">Proietti</a>, <a href="/tags/joseph-mcelroy">Joseph McElroy</a>, <a href="/tags/mcelroy">mcelroy</a>, <a href="/tags/haraway">haraway</a>, <a href="/tags/hayles">hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/levi">levi</a>, <a href="/tags/bakhtin">bakhtin</a>, <a href="/tags/toffler">toffler</a>, <a href="/tags/chomsky">Chomsky</a>, <a href="/tags/tabbi">tabbi</a>, <a href="/tags/wilson">wilson</a>, <a href="/tags/american">american</a>, <a href="/tags/contemporary">contemporary</a>, <a href="/tags/fiction">fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/narrative">narrative</a>, <a href="/tags/mcluhan">mcluhan</a>, <a href="/tags/barth">barth</a>, <a href="/tags/calvino">calvino</a>, <a href="/tags/science-fiction">science fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/cyborg">cyborg</a>, <a href="/tags/ballard">ballard</a>, <a href="/tags/clarke">clarke</a>, <a href="/tags/hjortsberg">Hjortsberg</a>, <a href="/tags/vonnegut">vonnegut</a>, <a href="/tags/no">No</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1093 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comConfronting Chaoshttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/electrochaotic
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Joseph Tabbi</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-02-19</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="epigraph">This essay-review first appeared in the Fall 2003 issue of <span class="journaltitle">Contemporary Literature</span>.</p>
<p>As conceptual frameworks for the study of postmodern literature, chaos and complexity have been on the table for some time. N. Katherine Hayles in <span class="booktitle">Chaos Bound</span> (1990), Alexander Argyros in <span class="booktitle">A Blessed Rage for Order</span> (1991), and Gordon Slethaug in <span class="booktitle">Beautiful Chaos</span> (2000) included chapters on 20th-century authors who worked self-consciously with chaotics before its key concepts were systematized as a science and (simultaneously) popularized by James Gleick. Joseph Conte’s contribution is to elaborate chaotics into a full-fledged aesthetic, prevalent in contemporary culture whether or not chaos is recognized as a paradigm shift on the order of relativity or the Copernican revolution. <span class="booktitle">Design &amp; Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction</span> does more than fill out received concepts with detailed readings of an expanded range of texts. Conte reinvigorates a field that was always in danger of growing diffuse through its range and diversity of applications, and he does this by noting specific convergences and “shared convictions” arrived at independently between chaotics and contemporary poetics (3). Most comprehensively, <span class="booktitle">Design and Debris</span> demonstrates that chaos theory can help delineate the perennial, unfinished, but still productive transition from modernism, with its signature “ideas of order” rescued from chaos, to postmodern multiplicity, uncertainty, and risk. Within the postmodern field, Conte makes important literary distinctions, keyed to imposed and emergent designs out of chaos. In a series of chapters (each one a stand-alone introduction to an important author), Conte distinguishes “proceduralists” (John Barth, Gilbert Sorrentino, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, Harry Mathews) from more “dynamic” postmodern practitioners (Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker). In a final chapter, Conte makes a strong case for understanding “[t]his disturbing transition between print and digital communication” in terms of chaotics (197).</p>
<p>The word “disturbing” in that last citation is worth pausing over because it indicates a way of conceptualizing fiction as an ongoing concern, placing it politically, and deciding which fictions are successful inventions within a chaotic environment. Politically, the language of disruption and disturbance is an advance on “subversive,” “dissenting,” “radical,” or “resisting” - characterizations that either give too much or too little agency to authors and their works. A disturbance is neither a direct intervention nor an aestheticization of politics. Rather than reify (and hence give credence to) the power being resisted, and rather than domesticate the intractable material world by reducing it to mere text, the writer “administers… disturbances, the painful rifts in context that may eventually bring better things” (to cite A.R. Ammons, <span class="booktitle">Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues</span>. Ed. Zofia Burr. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996: page 26. Ammons, incidentally, is treated in Conte’s first book, <span class="booktitle">Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry</span> [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).</p>
<p>Such change, however, is brought about neither through personal will, material manipulation, nor the conscious organization of human masses into collectivities. Established orders, because they remain tied to human consciousness, are “merely personal and contingent,” their fragility borne out by a century-long history of unfinished modernity and abortive, unruly, or simply unsatisfactory social transformations. Chaotics and complexity theory present themselves as alternatives to classic Modernist orders, whose concern for a centering control has tended to approach either fascism (in the poets W. B.Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, as read by Michael North); Marxism (in the depression-era novelists Edward Dahlberg, Nelson Algren, Henry Miller, Nathanael West, and John Dos Passos as reconsidered by William Solomon); or the neo-liberalism of large-scale culture-management, whose playful simulated orders could well prove to be the most materially destructive of all. A sign of a truly contemporary artist, says Conte, is a willingness to cultivate “an affinity for - rather than an aversion to - forms of disorder” (8). By no longer regarding disorder as “a solely destructive or irrational state,” the artist (in company with the theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and others), seeks “to destabilize orderly institutions and revel in the unpredictability that results as a forum for unrestricted play and the possibilities of discovery” (8-9).</p>
<p>The language here is too general. The fascists in Germany, at their rise, were not averse to destabilizing institutions and reveling in “unrestricted play.” But even within Conte’s postmodern context, “play” as a word and concept needs qualification. One finds in the form of Conte’s chosen fictions very little that resembles, for example, the play of toddlers, which is usefully aimless while bringing into “play” muscles and physical positions that will be needed later, for more directed activity. There are no amateur babies, as DeLillo says somewhere. Play in postmodern fiction (and in the “language games” so often invoked by contemporary theory) more often resembles the highly restricted, directed, and rule-based play of The Universal Baseball Association, Henry Waugh, Prop. Coover’s fictional league, created using detailed skill charts (for invented players) and a set of three dice, becomes, in Conte’s reading, a “dynamical system whose survival and collapse depends upon complex equilibria between error and perfection, power and control, chance and design” (141). What makes such a description possible, even plausible, is the fact that each event in every baseball game, whether actual or simulated, played out on a board or only narrated in fiction, can be reduced to the terms of credits and debits. (Not for nothing is Coover’s character, Henry Waugh, an accountant). A strike is a credit to the pitcher and a debit to the batter; an error is a debit to the fielder but a null entry, neither a credit nor a debit, to the hitter, and so forth; all contingencies can be tallied in the end, as in any system of accounting. The extent and exactitude of the capitalist analogy is what makes such systems appear “universal.” Outside of any one individual’s financial or athletic performance, games and markets are equally subject to mathematical rule, although once the play has reached a certain complexity, both are equally subject to turbulence, indeterminacy, and potential collapse. Such is the generalizing power of chaotics.</p>
<p>But the generalization ends when natural events and processes, not fully accountable numerically, come under discussion. The toddler’s play, for example, is a chaos capable of producing an order, a natural order that arises unconsciously and without any rules other than those formulated from within the play itself. This is what I understand as a properly immanent order, not the order imposed by games and markets, or by authors who work under a preconceived set of rules. Conte eloquently defends the imposition of design at the level of composition as a way of bringing authors outside themselves, producing surprising results, even a “creative autonomy” in “a generative text that far exceeds the enumeration of its preordained structure” (84). But the unfolding design in an arabesque, a procedural narrative, or a computer-generated attractor, though subject to the same mathematical formalism as the `strange attractor’ in, for example, an approaching storm, is not responding to the same inputs. Design, even if unpredictable, capable of producing surprise after several iterations and multiple feedback loops, is set in motion by a human consciousness working with certain ideal forms such as numbers. Immanence is larger than consciousness, a product of nature; it has no ideals, only a range of deviations from the numerical norm. (In eliding the natural and the cultural, Conte is no different from most constructivist critics of his generation, born after the introduction of Strat-O-Matic<sup>TM</sup> board games in 1960).</p>
<p>Proof of the emergence of chaotics as a cultural dominant, however, is not in the superiority of a priori arguments, but in the the range of narrative concerns and techniques that can be newly articulated in terms of chaotics and freshly applied to a range of authors (whether or not they are consciously informed by science). Particularly welcome in Conte is the expansion of a near-defunct narratological language, one that has, unfortunately, made reflexivity in fiction seem far more involuted and text-obsessed than it is in practice. By contrast, Conte finds that “reflexive references” amount to “more than rampant intertextuality” in Sorrentino (90); “disrupted codes” (of gender especially) in Acker are not like most feminist rewritings of classic and contemporary fiction: rather than isolate a single channel of causality in male dominance (which traditional feminists can then coopt or resist), Acker elaborates “competing principles of discipline and anarchy, intentionality and impulse, control and freedom” (54). “Similarities across scale” reveal, in Hawkes, “pattern underlying chaos” (45); “design,” writes Hawkes, “inevitably surrenders to debris, debris inevitably reveals its innate design” (qtd in Conte 40). Rather than remain within debilitating systems of paranoid opposition in Thomas Pynchon, Conte speaks of an “ungovernable middle ground,” a space of disruption and material production, not a compromise (174). The dissipating conceit of white noise in DeLillo is less of a “mystery” (DeLillo’s preferred term) than a condition of communication, figuring an environment of noise out of which all meaning emerges - not least the finely tooled, resonant, but finally, sometimes frustratingly, indeterminate sentences that characterize DeLillo’s work. Conte does a service by revealing, in science, a language no less flexible and conceptually more robust than any of the literary languages developed independently. Such an integrated science-and-literature approach, rather than attacking literary autonomy or dismissing attempts at precision as mere jargon, is capable of defining what is specifically literary in our encounter with works of fiction.</p>
<p>At a time when centralized authority is lacking and reference is under erasure, fiction - if it is not to collapse into informatics or entertainment - nonetheless needs to adhere in its forms to cultural systems, events, and conceptual paradigms - “the on-goingness of the world,” in Coover’s words (qtd. in Conte 143). Even experimental writing that works self-consciously with language has to find resonance in a world whose sources of understanding, in both long-term evolution and short-term technical complexification, remain outside language. The disconnect between word and world, and the postmodern emphasis on (a largely imposed, highly orchestrated) play and invention, are often taken as a licence for free play within language. But the continued production of difference could just as easily be given as something else: rather than exhaust energies in wholly literary reflexings, why not instead coordinate the literary with the scientific, test one’s critical concepts against the precision within scientific language, and explore the still large areas of freedom and uncertainty afforded by science in its most imaginative and least instrumental forms? Conte is of course not the first critic to notice complexity in his selected authors, but by linking complexity with the scientific field, Conte lets us see more clearly the intrinsic importance of these authors - although that argument is left implicit in this mostly unpolemical book. (See <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/machinic">“The Medial Turn”</a> for an account of earlier attempts by John Johnston and Susan Strehle to introduce complexity and technology into the field of critical writing on American fiction.)</p>
<p>Conte does not, for example, use his governing distinction (imposed/emergent) as a way of distinguishing inherent value in postmodern texts. There is no choice or preference between the creation of chaotic systems out of imposed (what Conte misleadingly calls “immanent”) orders and the emergence of order out of chaos: both approaches are equally useful in breaking down Western distinctions that separate order from chaos. Still, either approach seems to me to hold risks that Conte does not address. The danger of an imposed order, for example in the constrained writing articulated by Mathews and the Oulipo (Workshop for Potential Literature), is that rules and procedures (even self-imposed rules and procedures) can become boring compensations for a lack of native energy. In a book as remarkable as <span class="booktitle">The Journalist</span>, however, energy re-asserts itself with a vengeance, as the careful, proliferating categories imposed by Mathews’ note-taking protagonist - the “journalist” of the title - are overwhelmed by the authorial life they are meant to articulate and control. I’m not so sure, however, that Barth or Sorrentino (two other “proceduralists” discussed by Conte) open their own, highly literary, procedures to the same level of worldly energy. Both writers, Barth more than Sorrentino, to some extent deal with the language of science and Barth, in his story “Click,” cleverly transfers hypertext signifiers to the page - in the pages of no less of an American institution than the <span class="booktitle">Atlantic Monthly</span> (December 1997: 81-96). But such technical language is included mainly for its momentary strangeness, and then quickly recuperated into longstanding significations familiar to modernist and postmodern literature. The non-literary effects and broad-based transformations that science and hypertext actually introduce into the culture thus tend to be domesticated rather than invoked. We are consoled, not confronted by complexity.</p>
<p>A reliance on emergent design, by contrast, with its more thoroughgoing commitment to disruption, too often and for too long can remain at the level of formlessness and subversion or, in Kathy Acker, frozen between “responses of submission (desire) and revolt (hatred)” (57). A world in constant suspension is no alternative to a Western tradition of controlled opposition. Given the choice, most readers, feminists and post-colonialists included, would prefer inhabiting the old Western world, managing opposition, deconstructing power, and “including” the excluded rather than letting others be other. Among the postmodern “disruptors,” Pynchon seems best to understand the ongoing fascism of forcing Western values on formerly colonized populations - whether or not the people are willing, and regardless of the ways that altruism abolishes non-western, pre-technological social forms. Among the outcomes of such imposed order are: (in <span class="booktitle">Gravity’s Rainbow</span>) the mass suicides that accompany the introduction of contraception into Herero culture; (in <span class="booktitle">Vineland</span>) the real-time filming by participant-reporters in anti-war demonstrations, who ultimately betray the cause; and (in <span class="booktitle">Mason &amp; Dixon</span>) the imposition of rational grids and two-dimensional maps on native American topologies. In each case energies capable of producing a change are controlled by instrumental technology; whole nations are not so much occupied as obviated, while individuals are “embedded” (to use current jargon) rather than being allowed to do their own research and find their own news. In the face of such universal co-optation, literature’s main purpose - to become itself, a thing in itself, a discrete formation - seems to me all the more urgent. Immersion in the materials and media of modern culture is essential - and Conte, following Tom LeClair, is right to demand that his writers become “masterly” (198). But for emergence in fiction really to work, a perspective longer than the one given by technoculture is needed. Forms of cognition need to be larger than consciousness if the disruption is ever to do more than reply in the negative to the explanations, rational systems, and proliferating discursiveness of the past century - what to Ammons has seemed a “century of explanation” (<span class="booktitle">Set in Motion</span> 49).</p>
<p>Convincing as a description of colliding orders, and useful as a way of distinguishing tendencies within an increasingly diffuse aesthetic, chaotics seems to me less readily borne out by the collision of print and electronic paradigms. Conte rightly contrasts the World Wide Web, with its rhizomatic structures “unlimited in any direction and self-similar in every dimension” and the “hierarchical systems” associated with central control models of information (199-200). But this shift at the level of material technology does not necessarily produce a shift in how we read - except, perhaps, to discourage sustained reading or writing of any kind, with constant interruptions, embedded interfaces requiring attention, requests for response, codes to remember, and the constant need to back up and track versions of the document being read, composed, or read-as-composed. The electronic disturbance is creatively disruptive, to be sure, but not in the way that literature is disruptive. Writers seeking to break from established forms and hierarchies have always, it is true, worked against the “line” of print. In postmodern fiction nonlinearity (of plot, design, and sentence construction) has been the rule rather than the exception, as Conte points out (following George P. Landow in <span class="booktitle">Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology</span>. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). And in contemporary poetry, the prevalence of free verse has already shifted to more dynamic forms that emerge within the line, toward caesurae, internal rhymes, enjambed sentences, and hyphenated words carried over line breaks that, taken together, create a meandering motion down the page more often than the box-like structure of traditional rhymed verse. Long before hypertext, surfictionists and concrete poets in print have gone so far as to experiment with punctuation and to bring forward the physical placement of words on the page. Such material invention is possible, however, only when the page itself is stable and the symbols on it are inert. A period, comma, or colon, whether or not it is used in accordance with established rules of punctuation, can direct readers mentally to stop, pause, or conjoin words or concepts on either side of the mark, creating nonlinearities from moment to moment within the reading of a print text. The material marks themselves, however, do not actually stop, pause, or link together thoughts going on at the site of reading, the way that programmable syntax directs what’s going on at the level of code, a kind of automatized collectivist thinking that is mostly hidden from the text on a computer screen. Print punctuation works toward a nonlinear reading experience precisely because the page is fixed and arbitrary. A system that is itself nonlinear, that takes readers literally from text to text, from one reading trajectory to another, can actively prevent the experience of nonlinearity in language (whether or not the texts or trajectories are linked arbitrarily or made to cohere conceptually; whether or not coherences are produced by the author or by the reader).</p>
<p>In the print fiction Conte considers, nonlinearities are all produced within the two-dimensional space of a conventional page; in hypertext, the page itself is multidimensional and nonlinear, so our attention is made to shift from nonlinearities of written language to nonlinearities of technology itself - that is, from cognitive to performative nonlinearity. The question arises, unwelcome in its breadth but at least capable now of being clearly formulated - as to whether you can go on having literature when its signature thought structures, developed more or less in tandem with the creation of the codex book and the print page, have become literalized on a screen or electronic writing space that itself changes. A virtue of chaotics-as-poetics is that it allows us, again, to address the perennial question, What is Literature, in terms that resituate the literary in its own materiality. Larger than consciousness and irreduceable to discursive meaning, chaotics embraces modes of cognition that are multiply embodied and continually mediated through neural networks, informational pathways, and modules in the brain. The same language of pathways, nodes, modules, and rhizomes has been applied, more or less accurately, to communications networks and media. Print is now one among many media, each of which holds different constraints on what can be said, written, and thought. And even though books continue to be produced, in volumes hitherto unthinkable for audiences only a generation or two away from illiteracy, the book-objects are now different texts capable of being read differently; they have become hybrid, “participating in the overall hybridity of the data ensemble around [them]” - as the critic Hanjo Berressem writes of his own print essay accompanying a recent cd-rom of conference proceedings, “Chaos/Control: Complexity.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 45.1 (2000): 5-21. <span class="booktitle">Chaos Theory and Cultural Production</span>. CD-ROM (Hamburg: Lit, 2002).</p>
<p>This understanding of texts themselves as elements in a medial ecology makes an ecological concept such as chaos all the more appropriate as a preferred term for contemporary literary study. “The discovery,” or rather rediscovery by literary theorists, “of the nonlinearity of textual space arrives at much the same cultural moment as the investigation of nonlinear dynamics in the physical world,” as Conte puts it (197). Opportunities for integration abound. The Web with its multiplex connections is doubtless a better site than print for creating aesthetic design within informational debris. The humanities, absent during most of the generic book’s material development (first by monks and later by scientific, commercial, and political publishers), would do well not to be left out this time around. Integration, however, does not mean absorption into the sciences. Natural and medial ecologies, while describable similarly in terms of chaos, complexity, and interdependence rather than opposition, should not be regarded as identical. As with performative hypertexts and conceptual works of literature, what’s decisive are the differences in materiality, since literature’s power rests, like the power of consciousness itself, on its not being capable of direct, immediate, effective action in or on the world.</p>
<p>What is literary cannot be too literal, lest particular meanings collapse into the same instrumental, informatic, and operational meanings that characterize faster communications criss-crossing the Web at every moment. Conte writes, “If we accept that language - though artificial - is a dynamical system, then predetermined rules will produce unpredictable results” (84-85). But language cannot be a system; “though artificial,” language is also, like “us,” a product of nature, the result of millions of minds over millions of years bumping against the constraints and contingencies of the natural world. Syntax, formal structures, and rules of grammar can to an extent be systematized; and the use of language can produce other language in other minds (sometimes, as in love and aesthetics, a coordinated language). But language as such cannot be made materially to effect changes in minds or in actual, worldly operations. This is the crucial difference, the source of nonlinearities and differences that writers explore on the page, producing differences that are unusual in that they materially change nothing. Yet such conceptual production is the only way that literature, as such, can help effect a cultural transition from one order to another order.</p>
<p>About one thing Conte is absolutely correct: no literary hypertext has yet matched “for sheer fictive power and inventive genius such authors as John Barth, Italo Calvino, Julio Cortázar, B.S. Johnson, Milorad Pavic, Georges Perec, or Christine Brook-Rose - all of whom anticipate hypertextual linking and nonlinear narrative in their fiction” (198). Conte, however, goes on to suggest that a continuation and extension of the postmodern narrative tradition will resume “Only when the imaginative verve - which has little to do with computer savvy - that our most important writers possess has been brought intrinsically to the hypertext environment.” Yet the question remains: if the importance of Conte’s chosen writers is based on their capacity for disruption, if they are themselves products of a transitional moment, might not their aesthetic, so well recognized and so well formulated by Conte, be impossible to reproduce or even to recognize in the event of its emergence in the new digital environments? Verve alone may not be enough to extend a progressive literary practice that, despite its largely unconscious anticipations of hypertext, grew out of the medium that nourished it and constrained it - the same print medium that makes possible Conte’s own highly evolved, and increasingly rare, critical practice. Conte gives a nice survey of authorial testimony - DeLillo needing the clack of a typewriter, Barth writing longhand (“Black Montblanc Meisterstûck 146 fountain,” as the author/narrator writes in a pseudo-hypertextual <span class="emphasis">scene</span> in “Click”). Gaddis used to laboriously, and literally, cut and paste lines of typed text into his slow-developing, legal-sized manuscript pages. And Pynchon, one likes to think, is still drafting novels on the same graph paper he used for solving problem sets as an undergraduate engineering major. While composing their fictions, the last generation of postmodern writers (whether `last’ in the sense of previous or final, is for the next generation to decide) were still in the enviable position of being able to forget the medium, print, that nourished their vision and also constrained their thought. In restrospect, their immanent, imposed, and emergent designs may turn out to have mostly to do with a forgotten medium, print, which of course after e-media is now no longer forgettable.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/joe-conte">joe conte</a>, <a href="/tags/joe-tabbi">joe tabbi</a>, <a href="/tags/joseph-conte">joseph conte</a>, <a href="/tags/joseph-tabbi">joseph tabbi</a>, <a href="/tags/chaos">chaos</a>, <a href="/tags/chaotic">chaotic</a>, <a href="/tags/hayles">hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/argyros">argyros</a>, <a href="/tags/delillo">delillo</a>, <a href="/tags/sorrentino">sorrentino</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodern">postmodern</a>, <a href="/tags/modernis">modernis</a>, <a href="/tags/burr">burr</a>, <a href="/tags/ammons">ammons</a>, <a href="/tags/gleick">gleick</a>, <a href="/tags/mathews">mathews</a>, <a href="/tags/pynchon">pynchon</a>, <a href="/tags/acker">acker</a>, <a href="/tags/coover">coover</a>, <a href="/tags/deleuze">deleuze</a>, <a href="/tags/guattari">guattari</a>, <a href="/tags/derrida">derrida</a>, <a href="/tags/fascist">fascist</a>, <a href="/tags/narratolog">narratolog</a>, <a href="/tags/oulipo">oulipo</a>, <a href="/tags/barth">barth</a>, <a href="/tags/leclair">leclair</a>, <a href="/tags/l">l</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator997 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comSomething Is Happening, Mr. Joneshttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/elitism
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Marjorie Perloff</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1996-04-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/criticalecologies/outselling">Cultural Criticism and The Politics of Selling Out</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>In his provocative essay <a class="internal" href="http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/outselling">Cultural Criticism and the Politics of Selling Out</a>, Michael Bérubé rightly worries about an “academic left whose chief function is to analyze and interpret the formation of the hegemonies that are actually being formed by our counterparts on the right.” “I fear,” Bérubé remarks, “an intellectual regime in which cultural studies is becoming nothing more than a parasitic kind of color commentator on the new authoritarian populism of the Age of Gingrich, too busy dissecting the postmodern eugenicist-libertarian- cybernetic-fundamentalist Right to be of any use in actually opposing it” (10).</p>
<p>Touché! We can carry Bérubé’s argument one step further and point out that the present divorce between the academic literary/cultural studies establishment and the public sphere is perhaps best understood as an extreme form of the ivory-towerism we claim to reject. For even as leftist cultural critics castigate what Bérubé calls the “postmodern eugenicist-libertarian-cybernetic-fundamentalist Right,” something else is happening and, to cite the old Bob Dylan song, “you don’t even know it, do you, Mr. Jones?” That something is the rise of serious literary and art venues <span class="lightEmphasis">outside the university</span> which is so hostile them.</p>
<p>Let me begin with a personal anecdote. When my daughter Carey Perloff became the director of the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco four years ago, she instituted a series of symposia to accompany each production, a series for which she even received a sizable grant from the NEH. The symposia are usually on Monday evenings when the theatre is dark and are free to the public; additional discussion groups occur after particular performances. For <span class="booktitle">The Tempest</span>, for example, Carey invited Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley) and Harry Berger (Santa Cruz) to speak; for Tom Stoppard’s <span class="booktitle">Arcadia</span>, Katherine Hayles (UCLA) addressed the issue of chaos theory and narrative structure; for Euripides’ <span class="booktitle">Hecuba</span>, the symposium included law professor Jeremy Waldron (Bowlt), classicist Helena Foley (Barnard), and the anthropologist Martin Bernal (Cornell). And so on. I myself am shortly going to be on a panel discussing “language” theatre with poet-dramatist-novelist Mac Wellman and poet-dramatist-publisher Douglas Messerli, in conjunction with the production of Eric Overmyer’s delicious parody of <span class="foreignWord">film noir</span>, <span class="booktitle">Dark Rapture</span>.</p>
<p>Very few scholars turn down the invitation to speak at ACT even though the honorarium is small, evidently because they are pleased to have a chance to address a non-academic public. And on these occasions, the theatre is packed. People - lawyers, doctors, business people, Silicon valley types, students, artists, actors, designers - will sit for a few hours just to argue for and against ACT’s interpretation of Caliban’s role in <span class="booktitle">The Tempest</span>, about the use of mathematical models in determining the plot line of <span class="booktitle">Arcadia</span>, or about the efficacy of Paul Schmidt’s hypercolloquial translation of Chekhov’s <span class="booktitle">Uncle Vanya</span>. The discussion, in other words, deals with those “literary” issues we used to discuss in the classroom - issues which are now considered hopelessly passé by an “enlightened” professoriat that has abandoned genius theory, concepts of literary value, and the pleasure principle in its in zeal to unmask the oppressiveness of various discourses, of defining subject position and representative agency in the writings of the marginalized, and so on.</p>
<p>But the basic human instinct to produce, participate in, and enjoy art-making is not that easily squelched. Even as the Berkeley or Stanford English department turns its back on courses that allow for discussion of the problems of translating Chekhov for a contemporary audience or prompt a class to discuss, in anything like an open forum, the meaning of “magic” in <span class="booktitle">The Tempest</span>, the venues have moved elsewhere. At ACT, when the discussion is over, the audience (an audience, incidentally, racially and ethnically quite mixed, reflecting, especially, San Francisco’s large Asian-American population) looks extremely disappointed; there are still hands up, people waiting to express themselves on this or that issue. And lately there have been additional post-performance discussions with the director, set designers, actors, and stage manager.</p>
<p>Or, to take a quite different example, consider the recent success of the Vermeer exhibition at the National Gallery. Here is an item from the <span class="booktitle">New York Times</span> for February 19, 1996:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">At 9 P.M. on Saturday, Feb. 10, a line started forming outside the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The visitors were determined to see the blockbuster Vermeer exhibition when it opened for its final day at 11 the next morning. The museum reported that the 14-hour wait was the longest recorded for any exhibition there.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">“People came with pup tents, mattresses and futons,” said Deborah Ziska, a spokeswoman for the National Gallery. “There was a continuous candlelight chess game going, and even someone selling a T-shirt that read ‘I Survived the Vermeer Line.’”…. The show attracted a total of 327, 551 visitors [during a 70-day run]…. the Vermeer catalogue ($19.95 in paperback; $45, hard-cover) has become a best seller, setting a record with 55, 498 copies. [ <span class="booktitle">New York Times</span>, 19 Feb. 1996, B4).</p>
<p>How do we explain this phenomenon? We can attribute some of the fuss to publicity, to the media presentation of the show as the “one and only” chance to see so many of the extremely rare Vermeers in one place at one time. But publicity cannot account for the fact that people - again, all sorts of people - lined up for weeks at 5.30 A.M. in sub-zero weather just to get into the museum and see twenty-two small paintings that have neither the sex appeal of Mapplethorpe nor the splashiness of such blockbuster shows as the “Treasures of Tutamkhamun.”</p>
<p>On the day I attended in early January, the crowd, once inside the building, was curiously subdued and reverential. People patiently waited their turn to stand in front of the <span class="booktitle">View of Delft</span> (the painting Proust’s Swann wanted to see so badly when he was on his deathbed that he kept dreaming of the little yellow patch in the lower left and how gorgeously it was painted), just to contemplate what seems at first glance an ordinary seventeenth-century Dutch urban landscape - the silhouette of red and brown brick houses and church steeples along a nondescript waterfront.</p>
<p>At Stanford, I don’t believe we’ve had a course on Vermeer on the books in years. Indeed, single-artist courses are considered hopelessly tacky vis-à-vis such offerings as “Disciplining the Female Body in Surrealist Photography” or “Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and the Commodity Fetish.” But somehow the “public,” with their camp stools and pup tents are lined up around Constitution Avenue waiting for Vermeer. It is a phenomenon that should, to say the least, give us academics pause.</p>
<p>Finally, some thoughts about poetry venues in the late nineties. Those of us involved in the poetry world know that within the academy, especially the Ivy League academy, the study of poetry is considered largely retro and elitist, it being more difficult to pinpoint political issues in poetry than in fiction, not to mention cultural theory. For every course that actually studies a living poet, there must be dozens that study the writings of Homi Bhabba and Gayatri Spivak. “Public,” in this context, means little more than debating Habermas’s discussion of the public sphere, and so on.</p>
<p>My colleague Robert Harrison and I are currently teaching an undergraduate Humanities Honors seminar on two DWEM poets, Baudelaire and Rimbaud. The course has no particular “angle,” and we are not using the poetry to illustrate this or that hermeneutic theory; we are merely trying to expose students to the extraordinary and complex poems themselves. The first day forty-five students showed up, including a lot of graduate students, all insisting that they “must” get into the class. Weeding it out, we ended with a group of twenty-eight, including about ten grad students in fields as diverse as Philosophy, Psychology, and Slavic Studies. It has been an exciting class but sometimes discouraging when we realize how little background our students have. Thus a very bright and successful senior Modern Thought and Literature major came in to see me to explain his less than outstanding performance thus far. “Baudelaire,” he told me, “is the first poet I have ever read.”</p>
<p>Once exposed, however, this student and others like him catch the bug. And the predisposition, as in the case of this particular student, is already there because the poetry scene <span class="lightEmphasis">outside the university</span> is currently so exciting and engaging. In San Francisco, readings of new and experimental poetries are jammed. In New Hampshire, Romana Huk is currently organizing “Assembling Alternatives: An International Poetry Conference/Festival” to be held this August that promises to be, like the Robin Blaser festival in Vancouver last year, a major event. Romana Huk is a professor at the University of New Hampshire, but she has organized the festival largely on her own steam, found funding (non-university) for some of the foreign poets, and the rest of us going are paying our own way. Will it be worth it? Well, it’s a chance to hear and talk with Charles Bernstein and Johanna Drucker, Steve McCaffery and Joan Retallack and Nathaniel Mackey, with Tom Raworth and Denise Riley from the UK, and with poets and critics from around the world from as far away as Taiwan and Nigeria. What more could one want?</p>
<p>One of the subjects to be discussed in New Hamphsire is, in Huk’s words, “How changing poetries in new cultural contexts force us to rethink old debates about the subject, reader, and politics of form.” One would think this is a topic that would interest the intellectuals who are Bérubé’s constituency, but the facts speak otherwise. The academy’s aim over the last decade has been to make poetry as invisible as possible. Indeed, poetry (literature in general) is only permitted to appear in “and” and “in” constructions, as in the ubiquitous conference title “Literature and the Law,” or as in the article title “Interrogating Domestic Ideology in American Women’s Poetry” (the lead essay in the most recent issue of <span class="booktitle">American Literary History</span>). But the idea of poetry as a language construct, poetry as delight, poetry as itself a form of knowledge and not necessarily a conduit for domestic or any other ideology is rejected by most academics.</p>
<p>Accordingly, poetry must - and does - move out into the streets - or, more accurately, out onto the electronic highway. Bob Holman’s poetry slams at the Nyorcan Cafe may not convey the best that is known and thought in the world but their energy and vitality testify to the simple fact that the “public” - a sizable public - does care about poetry. <a class="outbound" href="http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/">The Electronic Poetry Center (epc)</a> at Buffalo, now read around the world on the Internet, is an amazing facility; every day I’m astonished by newcomers from nations around the globe who are participating in the conversation. Individuals like Al Filreis at Penn (see his Home Page) have brought serious postmodern poetries to classes of engineers and Wharton School students. Or again, take the activity on the John Cage List. On Feb. 8, 1996, the following posting appeared:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">I’m a 17 year old music student from the UK. As part of my A level examination (June 1997) coursework I have to write a dissertation on anything musical. However, after hearing some of Cage’s works (Amores is one of the set works) I was really enchanted, and decided to try and find out as much as I could about him. I also decided that it would be great to make him the subject of my coursework (not to mention different - everyone else writes about Bach Chorales, and Freddie Mercury apparently!). Anyway, after finding minimal information in encyclopedias etc. I decided to ‘surf the net’ to see what I could find. Imagine my delight when I discovered a whole mailing list dedicated to him!!!</p>
<p>And, having raised various issues about Cage and Zen Buddhism, the writer signed off as “Helen.”</p>
<p>I found Helen’s posting quite moving in its sense of discovery. She isn’t, evidently, listening to Cage’s music because it’s fashionable: in the UK, let’s remember, Cage continues, at least in the pages of leading periodicals like <span class="booktitle">The London Review of Books</span>, to be regarded as something of a joke: the American who invented a piano piece made up of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence! And even in the U.S., you won’t find Cage’s work figuring much in the university curriculum, certainly not in English and/or Cultural Studies departments. So seventeen-year olds who are interested will increasingly turn elsewhere - most probably, like Helen, to surfing the net.</p>
<p>It will be objected, of course, that British secondary-school students who take A levels are already an elite group even as it will be objected, by some readers of this essay, that ACT patrons, National Gallery goers, and those who attend avant-garde poetry festivals belong to a particular elite. My reply to this is simple. The left intellectuals to whom Bérubé refers - say, Fredric Jameson critiquing Tony Bennett’s “Putting Policy into Cultural Studies” in <span class="booktitle">Social Text</span> - are not exactly writing for the “public” either. They are writing for one another, refining specific points in what is an ongoing and increasingly arid neo-Marxist argument. Indeed, the special skills and knowledge required to read such an article are at least as “elitist” as the knowledge required to discuss a performance of a Chekhov play or a poem by Susan Howe. And it can be argued that if we really do want to produce some kind of rapprochement with the public, perhaps it’s time, not to “sell out,” as Bérubé fears he’s doing when he lets the <span class="booktitle">New Yorker</span> editor cut and rearrange his prose, but to ask ourselves what our training in literary theory, history, and criticism actually enables us to do for the sizable public that is finding it cannot, after all, seem to do without its particular pleasures.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/greenblatt">greenblatt</a>, <a href="/tags/berger">berger</a>, <a href="/tags/stoppard">stoppard</a>, <a href="/tags/hayles">hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/waldron">waldron</a>, <a href="/tags/foley">foley</a>, <a href="/tags/bernal">bernal</a>, <a href="/tags/wellman">wellman</a>, <a href="/tags/messerli">messerli</a>, <a href="/tags/overmyer">overmyer</a>, <a href="/tags/schmidt">schmidt</a>, <a href="/tags/chekhov">chekhov</a>, <a href="/tags/vermeer">vermeer</a>, <a href="/tags/bhabba">bhabba</a>, <a href="/tags/spivak">spivak</a>, <a href="/tags/harrison">harrison</a>, <a href="/tags/baudelaire">baudelaire</a>, <a href="/tags/rimbaud">rimbaud</a>, <a href="/tags/marx">marx</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator915 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comLexia to Perplexia:http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/imagenarrative/perplex
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Talan Memmott</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2000-12-30</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>tech needs: Netscape 4.x or Internet Explorer 4.x | screen resolution 1024 x 768</p>
<p><a class="popup" href="http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr11/11mem/plex/index.html" name="PerpLexia_viewer" properties="toolbar=no,location=no,directories=no,status=no,menubar=no,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,width=900,height=550, top=20, left=60" id="PerpLexia_viewer">Click here</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/posthuman">posthuman</a>, <a href="/tags/hayles">hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/memmott">memmott</a>, <a href="/tags/image">image</a>, <a href="/tags/narrative">narrative</a>, <a href="/tags/fiction">fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/webart">webart</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator850 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comPervaded by Epistemologyhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/blogstyle
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Geniwate</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-04-20</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>This review is also a reply to earlier <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> reviews by <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/wrItten">Zervos</a> and <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/playful">Koskimaa</a>. Introductory descriptions about <span class="booktitle">Writing Machines</span> are not included. A less linear, more smooth-flowing Flash-based hypertext can be accessed <a class="outbound" href="http://www.electronicbookreview.com/standalone/electropoetics/geniwateele/haylesrev3.html">here</a> (by those possessing current Flash software).<br />
[Ed.]</p>
<h2>themes</h2>
<p>In <span class="booktitle">Writing Machines</span>, Hayles wants to create a literary approach which is ‘alert to the importance of materiality in cultural productions’ (page 19). This leads her to develop media-specific analysis (MSA). Now that there are alternatives to print publication, we can no longer ‘ignore the material specificities of the codex book’ (among other types of publication) (page 32). Litcrit should expand to include <a class="thread" href="/thread/imagenarrative">images</a>, for the ‘print-centric view fails to account for all the other signifying components of electronic texts, including sound, animation, motion, video, kinesthetic involvement, and software functionality, among others’ (page 20). One questions that arises is in what sense MSA can be considered a theory of literature, and whether the traditional category of literature is itself implicitly problematised by MSA.</p>
<h2>texts discussed</h2>
<p>Hayles seeks ‘a mode of critical interrogation alert to the ways in which the medium constructs the work and the work constructs the medium’ (page 6). A book is ‘an artifact whose physical properties and historical usages structure our interactions with it in ways obvious and subtle’ (page 22). For example, the material structure of paper (foregrounded in Tom Phillips’ <span class="booktitle">A Humument</span>), determines how the book is read but also ‘profoundly transforms the metaphoric network structuring the relation of word to world’ (page 23). This print effect can be compared to an electronic work like Talan Memmott’s <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span>. The third work Hayles discusses is <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span> by Mark Z Danielewski.</p>
<p>Although she argues that all literature is subject to the materiality of its production, Hayles analyzes texts that consciously foreground their materiality; thus, as <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/wrItten">Zervos</a> observes, the texts of interest to MSA are quite narrow, unlike the range of texts that can be accommodated within cybertextual analysis. However cybertext is a structuralist approach, not conceived of for close readings of specific texts. In my opinion, the potential for MSA to broaden critical approaches to textuality beyond ‘media essential’ (<a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/notmetaphor">Eskelinen</a>) disciplines can only be developed if it is released from the shackles of prior disciplines and specific contents.</p>
<h2>Lexia to Perplexia</h2>
<p>According to Hayles, ‘when a literary work interrogates the inscription technology that produces it, it mobilizes reflexive loops between its imaginative world and the material apparatus embodying that creation as a physical presence’ (page 25). <a class="internal" href="/imagenarrative/perplex">Lexia to Perplexia</a> by Talan Memmott is a web-based programmed technotext that self-reflexively discusses its relationship with technology and distributed networks. Memmott postulates the co-originary status of subjectivity and electronic technologies (page 49) and describes a process of ‘cyborganization’ in which ‘human subjects [are transformed] into hybrid entities that cannot be thought without the digital inscription apparatus that produces them.’ (page 49) For Hayles, such technotexts ‘play a special role in transforming literary criticism into a material practice, for they make vividly clear that the issue at stake is nothing less than a full-bodied understanding of literature’ (page 26).</p>
<h2>lexia hack</h2>
<p>Hayles suggests that a difference between <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> and the print texts she discusses (<span class="booktitle">A Humument</span>; <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span>) is the amount of noise that resides on their surface. However, her chosen print texts are also very noisy. Meanwhile, Hayles does not mention the experiential distinctions between reading at a computer versus reading print which <a class="outbound" href="http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/chorus/composition/bernstein/">Bernstein</a> among others mentions. By downplaying differences between the material nature of electronic and print texts, Hayles can put them on the same literary continuum. She thus implicitly refutes those who warned ‘Kaye’ of the equivocal relationship between electronic writing and literature.</p>
<p>MSA combines structuralist insights with a more traditional close reading and political, phenomenological, and epistemological tensions result. Meanwhle, as <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/playful">Koskimaa</a> points out, Hayles alludes to the ‘highly contested field where allies and enemies sometimes count more than arguments’. Hayles seems to be situating herself above this field, but although she has the grace to avoid the rancour of some others in the field, she is deeply within it. The creation of territory is in general to be mourned; as we are seeing in Iraq, territories require borders, and borders seem to demand either expansionist or defensive strategies.</p>
<h2>three areas</h2>
<p>Prior to her discussion of <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span>, Hayles describes 3 eras of electronic writing analysis.</p>
<p>1. 1980s-1990’s - focused on the link, but the revolutionary claims for such works now appear inflated ‘for they were only beginning to tap into the extraordinary resources offered by electronic environments’ (pages 27-29).</p>
<p>2. 2nd generation electronic literature used other software and interfaces than Storyspace which ‘experimented with ways to incorporate narrative with sound, motion, animation, and other software functionalities’ and works that use combinatorial strategies, a computational perspective which ‘kills the literary priest’ (pages 27-28). These are different than technotexts because they don’t pay ‘particular attention to interactions between the materiality of inscription technologies and the inscription they produce’ (page 28).</p>
<p>Thus she introduces:</p>
<p>3. Media-specific analysis (MSA) ‘insists that texts must always be embodied to exist in the world. The materiality of those EMBODIMENTS interacts dynamically with linguistic, rhetorical, and literary practices to create the effect we call literature’ (page 31). All this talk of embodiments reveals one body that is greatly lacking: the human (reader’s) body. Although Hayles acknowledges it elsewhere, it seems we have yet to thoroughly reconceptualize propriocentric relations with revised notions of textuality like MSA in the wake of postmodernism. (Espen Aarseth’s text/machine [Cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, page 21] places the operator within the machine, but I suspect that a close analysis of this diagram would throw up conundrums.)</p>
<h2>A Humument</h2>
<p><span class="booktitle">A Humument</span> by Tom Phillips is an artist’s book inspired by Burroughs’ cutups and applied to an obscure Victorian novel. The original hypertextuality of the novel is compounded by Phillips’ grafting of a second-level hypertextuality. According to Hayles, by re-presenting another book, <span class="booktitle">A Humument</span> reflects on the material production of the novel and in particular on the editorial decisions that novelists make.</p>
<h2>House of Leaves</h2>
<p><span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span> by Mark Z Danielewski concerns media and textual mediation. <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span> ultimately becomes a ‘a metaphysical inquiry’ which ‘instantiates the crisis characteristic of post-modernism, in which representation is short-circuited by the realization that there is no reality independent of mediation’ (page 110). In ‘a frenzy of remediation’ <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span> consumes other media, but traces of these other media remain which result ‘in a transformed physical and narrative corpus’ (page 112).</p>
<h2>MIT Press</h2>
<p>Hayles responded to MIT Press’s series of small format books with extensive visual content ‘with excitement, seeing in… [Peter Lunenfeld’s] offer an opportunity to explore the interactions of words with images that had already attracted my attention in electronic media’ (page 143). Several areas needed to be conceptualised: the design, the autobiography, and the relationship to the website.</p>
<h2>design</h2>
<p>According to the designer, Anne Burdick, ‘In order to create a book that embodies its own critical concepts - a technotext - it is imperative that the design evolves in tandem with the text.’ Hayles wanted to create a book that re-presents itself, over and over. Burdick’s response was to create ‘material metaphors’ that ‘work and rework the body of the codex, amplifying the book’s status as a book.’ Burdick concludes that this approach reveals ‘much about the complex relationship between showing and telling, from the role of context in quotations to the ways in which we read’ (page 140). As <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/playful">Koskimaa</a> comments the combination of quotes from the text and images (for example, page 90, from <span class="booktitle">A Humument</span>) is inspired.</p>
<h2>design hack</h2>
<p>Burdick wants to facilitate affordance. Underlined capitalised words are ‘amplified entry points into the text’ and graphical elements offer ‘an alternative view of the conceptual terrain of the book’ (page 140). As <a class="outbound" href="http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/review/index.cfm?article=36">Thomas</a> points out however, the hypertextual-style underlinings in the book are semantically confusing; highlighting the difference between hardcopy and electronic texts may work against Hayles’ argument for continuity between electronic and print texts. With Zervos, I wondered whether various aspects of this distributed type of materiality foregrounded differences in materiality which Hayles actually seeks to suppress, as part of her project to create a discipline that encompasses them all.</p>
<h2>website</h2>
<p>One regret of Hayles is that footnotes and bibliography are forced onto the <a class="outbound" href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/mediawork/">MIT Press website</a> (page 143). The website contains essential academic aspects of the publication. Requires the Flash 6 plugin. Also worth a look is Eric Loyer’s Flash <a class="outbound" href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/mediawork/">response</a>, commented upon by <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/wrItten">Zervos</a>.</p>
<h2>website hack</h2>
<p>The website material, in particular the extensive bibliography, is so significant that I had to download and print it. Indeed MIT Press designed it to be printed and inserted in the book. This doesn’t work, because the codex book is not designed for extra material to be slotted in. The alternative is to simultaneously read in two different media, which is not enjoyable. Although Zervos is rather harsh on which is an undeniably interesting experiment in distributed textuality, reading becomes unduly complex, and the reader is confronted by material difference to such an extent that it may indeed work against Hayles’ project</p>
<h2>autobiography</h2>
<p>Hayles struggled with the autobiographical content that was part of the brief until she hit on the invention of an autobiographical persona, Kaye, which allowed her ‘a means of exuberant engagement’ (page 142).</p>
<h2>autobiography hack</h2>
<p>As a reader, I found the Kaye persona difficult to form a relationship with. I was constantly trying to judge how literally I should accept Kaye as a description of Hayles. If Kaye is Hayles, then what is the point of Kaye? However, Kaye’s existence makes an eminently readable narrative.</p>
<h2>philosophy</h2>
<p>Hayles experiments at the edges of language and criticism to situate technotexts in relation to ‘the materiality of the literary artifact’. Issues raised include the role of reader-response (phenomenological) approaches to textual materiality, and the nature of theory itself.</p>
<h2>materiality</h2>
<p>Materiality…emerges from interactions between physical properties and a work’s artistic strategies’ (page 33). It ‘depends on how the work mobilizes its resources as a physical artifact as well as on the user’s interactions with the work and the interpretative strategies she develops…’ (page 33). We hear about Kaye’s trouble in interpreting these texts because she had been concentrating too hard on reading words: ‘Finally it hit her: the work embedded the verbal narrative in a topographic environment in which word was interwoven with world’ (page 41). Kaye’s physical relationship to these textual topographies remains under-explored, but the introduction of spatial metaphors begs this question.</p>
<h2>phenomenology</h2>
<p>Kaye’s scientific training may predispose Hayles to treat the text as an objective artefact. MSA pivots around the materiality of the text, and implicit in MSA seems to be the existence of an ideal MSA-inspired reader/critic (that is, Hayles herself). To my more phenomenological mind, the materiality of the text is largely determined by a user’s perception of the material parameters of its production, which cannot be objectively proven.</p>
<h2>theory</h2>
<p>In one interlude, Hayles ponders the different definitions of theory for the sciences (distillation) and literature (interpretive frameworks) (page 104). Literature can’t renew itself by relying on new phenomena to explore like science can, because it depends on an established canon of lit texts. But lit scholars need noise unlike sciences (page 105). As ‘Kaye’s’ intellectual development took her away from science towards literature, she faced sharp differences in approach, from her own predisposition to ‘solving problems’ to that of ‘investigating problematics’ and increasingly desired to develop the latter approach (page 15).</p>
<p>However, at the same time ‘she never abandoned her comitment to precise explanation, feeling that if she really understood something she should be able to explain it to others so it was clear to them’ (page 14). Thus Hayles’ ideal MSA-informed reader, seems to tie in with a pseudo-empiricist world-view: texts are like molecules, available for analysis; if you can’t analyze texts and molecules you undermine the validity of rigorous research in science and in humanities. Epistemology pervades <span class="booktitle">Writing Machines</span>; it remains to be seen whether an MSA can be developed which is more reader/operator-response centered, in which the extent to which material analysis is foregrounded can be a facet of a reader’s interpretation.</p>
<h2>ambiguity</h2>
<p>Foregrounding materiality is a timely addition to contemporary criticism, but Hayles seeks to do too much - I want ambiguity, a liminal / emergent condition that I don’t want to resolve. My uneasiness with Hayles’ predeliction to over-determine the text is reflected in Aarseth’s belief that ‘cybertexts’ simply are (enjoyably) messy (Aarseth 1997, page 3) (although Aarseth also seems intent on taking some the messiness out with his textonomy).</p>
<h2>academy</h2>
<p>Hayles’ ‘cultural studies’ style arguments are incomplete in <span class="booktitle">Writing Machines</span>. A cultural studies perspective would discuss the territorialization of critical inquiry itself. For example, is Hayles predisposed to talk about materiality because her meta-project is to develop territory in which ‘electronic writing’ is on a continuum with print literature? A successful synthesis of this putative continuum would be in the interests of a Professor of English and Design / Media Arts.</p>
<p>Hayles includes visual media and programmed environments in MSA. Their relationship to ‘literature’ needs much further exploration, and whether this approach can be reconciled with existing disciplines is yet to be demonstrated. Aarseth (1997), to whom Hayles pays scant attention (as both Zervos and Koskimaa point out), suggests an over-arching analytic concept of ‘cybertext’: this seems at least logical. As Eskelinen says ‘Cybertext theory can justify the study of digital and electronic textualities in their own terms, instead of submitting or committing to the traditions of print literature(s)…’ Hayles’ ‘technotext’ is currently too tied to print literature to achieve this level of conceptual independence, although I hesitate in joining Zervos, who believes that one of Hayles’ core problems is her refusal to acknowledge that there is ‘some immaterial quality that is contained in, or produced by, all the actualisations [of poetry]’ beyond a poem’s materiality. This vaguely Romantic transcendentalism assists to create all the aspects of ‘literature’ that I have personally been struggling to escape: the concept of the literary work that justifies copyright (page 31) and the notion of author as indidivual genuis (page 32) being two that Hayles herself mentions.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/anne-burdick">anne burdick</a>, <a href="/tags/hayles">hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/mit-press">MIT Press</a>, <a href="/tags/design">design</a>, <a href="/tags/posthuman">posthuman</a>, <a href="/tags/aarseth">aarseth</a>, <a href="/tags/bernstein">bernstein</a>, <a href="/tags/cyberdebates">cyberdebates</a>, <a href="/tags/post-human-0">post-human</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator849 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com